ati xgp

darckhart

Senior member
Jul 6, 2004
517
2
81
Ok I read this here:

http://ati.amd.com/technology/xgp/index.html

And I'm VERY interested.

However, the last time I checked (and obviously this wasn't for laptops) for long-ish pcie16x extenders the price was insane. And the few companies I spoke with told me that maintaining such high data transfer severely limited the length of the connectors (I never saw any longer than 10 in). I also went to the JAE site ati links to, but couldn't find anything after browsing around quickly.

Anyone care to shed more light on how ATI is able to do this?
 

ViRGE

Elite Member, Moderator Emeritus
Oct 9, 1999
31,516
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They're probably using a PCIe 2.0 8x bus, which would be easier to route.
 

SunnyD

Belgian Waffler
Jan 2, 2001
32,674
146
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www.neftastic.com
Originally posted by: ViRGE
They're probably using a PCIe 2.0 8x bus, which would be easier to route.

They are going to use 8 PCIe lanes for this.

Originally posted by: postmortemIA
..and which exists for small fraction of notebooks.

That's why XGP will be part of AMD's Puma platform as an option. They will obviously have to market this, but judging by the feature set of Puma, I'm betting Asus and Acer will likely be among the first to jump on board with XGP capable Puma systems. Especially Asus, since they already came out with their external video solution - this just means something standardized that that can do. Even more likely to happen if companies like MSI and EVGA start actually producing XGP cards.

Of course though, we have to wait for the chicken and the egg. Need systems to support XGP to be made, but need XGP "cards" to be made to encourage system integrators to put XGP support in... What AMD really needs with this is a huge design win with someone like Asus or Acer... or an even bigger win like Dell (unlikely) or Gateway (more likely). Odds are though the first thing you'll see these in is something like Alienware.