jmke

A 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.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/d...portunity.html

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jmke

if you're a deskop user, what is keeping you from switching a laptop, if we leave out the price difference?

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wutske

You can expanded a desktop internally whereas a laptop is mostly externally. It could become quite messy and all the efforts to make more and more wireless devices to reduce the cable clutter can easily be destroyed by all the other external devices.

Other than that and the lack of 'fun', I won't see any reason to switch

jmke

A Docking resolves all that, you can have a neat office with all the extras hooked up the docking (extra HDDs, external VGa, 2 monitors, network, keyboard/mouse, sound system etc).

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Kougar

It doesn't resolve the internal component upgrade ability, which is partly what Wutske said.

A desktop is always going to be faster and more responsive than a laptop, offer a larger screen, and won't require regular battery replacements. It's also significantly cheaper for equivalent hardware...

Laptop docks are not a new thing, have yet to see one that was worth lugging around... almost easier to just move the entire desktop if you're going to move a laptop, charger, batteries, dock, speakers, screens, external keyboard, mouse, etc....

jmke

duh
why I said:
uses the same screen as the desktop
uhm... you don't lug those "around" you leave them at your desk, and only take the laptop...

you can have a laptop with 8gb ram, quad core CPU and two SSDs as in RAID0 as storage
now add external GFX ala HD5870 or something, using same keyb/mouse/screen through docking as desktop and extra storage HDDs, optical drives etc through USB 3.0 / eSATA 6gbps etc... closing in on a very fast alternative to the desktop PC

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thorgal

Who needs quadcores on the desktop, let alone in a laptop ?

How many people really use all those cores anyway, except the professional users (graphic and render artists, audio encoding/decoding, something a cpu will be obsolete for in a couple of years anyway - will be done in gpu in my humble opinion) ?

Different discussion of course, but just give me a fast dual core laptop with an ssd and a reasonable graphics option.

A second, high power graphics card integrated in a dock would seem like a very nice concept to me too

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jmke

exactly
but it's not bad to have a few cores "on the side" when needed, dual core is good, but as games and apps bring better dual-core support, the need for more cores becomes visible when you're multi-tasking

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wutske

I don't think many people are going to multitask this much that they'll need a quad core . Maybe a tripple core is more interesting where 2 cores are used for gaming and an extra core is available for all the background processes that are running.

The problem with docking is that you still have a lot of cables (in fact you'll have more cables as there are cables running towards your docking station and cables from your docking station to your laptop). A desktop is still better as you can place it out of sight and hide all the cables.

jmke

All you need is launch ONE application which is multithreaded, this will max out your dual-core CPU. Now if you want to launch another application, you will be limited and multi-tasking will run slower; now if you have 4 cores, and 2 are used by the application, then there are 2 free

uhm. Docking station requires not more cables than a desktop PC. Have you every worked with a docking station? You can hide the cables easily.



Put monitor at the top; laptop clicks into place.

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