Nvidia: External Graphics Accelerators for Notebooks Is a Big Opportunity
@ 2010/02/08A high-ranking executive from Nvidia Corp. said that it considers external graphics adapters for notebooks a big opportunity even though the company does not offer such products at the moment.
“I think it is a big opportunity. We have two strategies at Nvidia: one is to put graphics everywhere, the other one is to [find more ways to] integrate discrete chips into the box. I think there is definitely a place for [external graphics cards for notebooks], no question. We continue to look at whether this is a GPU [docking stations] or external devices,” said Rene Haas, general manager of the notebook GPU business at Nvidia, in a brief interview with X-bit labs.There are a lot of notebooks featuring high-performance microprocessors, but there are much less notebooks with high-performance graphics processors since discrete graphics chips increase the size and weight of mobile computers rather tangibly and are not needed crucially. A way to add high-performance graphics to laptops was introduced by ATI in 2008: external graphics cards and external graphics port (XGP) technology. Unfortunately, so far such graphics cards have hardly become widespread; in fact, there is only one XGP solution available: Mobility Radeon HD 3870 box available only from Fujitsu Siemens. One of the issues, believes Nvidia, is the price of such graphics solutions.
I'd rather build a SFF desktop rather than a desk full of stuff if given a choice. The only laptop I would buy would be a ~10 hour netbook, or a CULV laptop with integrated graphics that's close, that offers a decent keyboard.