Digital Home Thoughts: AMD Tech Day: Afternoon Sessions

The following article is part two of an article about the AMD Tech Day I attended on June 25th, 2008. Part one can be found here.

Looking at Discrete Graphics
After a lunch at the AMD cafeteria (paid for by AMD), the afternoon session kicked off with Ognjen Brkic, Product Market Manager – Graphic Products Group (Mobile), taking us through the realm of discrete graphics. Earlier this year, AMD did a survey where they asked people what the number one thing was they wished they could transfer from their desktop PCs to their notebooks, and the leading request was the graphics power of their desktop. Graphics on notebooks have traditionally been underpowered, and it's only fairly recently that we've started seeing GPUs on laptops that have enough power to play modern games and decode HD video without burdening the CPU.

The problem is that in order to deliver great graphics performance on a laptop, you typically need a discrete graphics chip – and that adds to the cost, power consumption, and often even the size of the laptop. So how can a user have a thin and light notebook without serious graphics firepower, yet still access a powerful GPU when they want to play games? ATI came up with XGP as a solution to this problem.


Figure 1: Brkic taking us through the AMD/ATI graphics solutions.

ATI XGP technology allows for a tremendous boost in graphics performance via an external graphics card that connects to the notebook. This graphics card will have dual GPUs in CrossFire mode, and will live in a small box that has its own power supply and cooling. By going external, this solution isolates power, thermals, and acoustics from the notebook enclosure. The connection is "hot pluggable", meaning you can connect the XGP box to the laptop without needing to reboot it. Oh, and one XGP box can drive up to four displays - so if you also use your laptop display, that's five-way display awesomeness! That's the good news. The bad news is that even PCI Express slots on laptops don't have enough bandwidth for high-resolution gaming, so ATI had to come up with a new connector. This means that you'll need a new laptop in order to take advantage of XGP – a bit less exciting now, is it? I was disappointed this wasn't something I could use with any notebook I own, but I understand the reasons for is: the bandwidth just isn't there.


Figure 2: An example of the what a typical XGP break-out box might ship with.


Figure 3: The Fujitsu Siemens XGP box.


Figure 4: This is the pipe down which the bits scream...


Figure 5: XGP boxes can also have USB ports on them, or whatever else the OEM decides. This makes them possible replacements for traditional docking stations. Lots of possibilities!


Figure 6: The other side of the XGP box, showing an external monitor connector, another USB port, and a power connector.

This is a long-term play from ATI because it will require the cooperation of the laptop OEMs to integrate this special port onto the motherboards of their laptops. Why will the laptop OEMs want to cooperate with ATI on this? Two reasons: first, being able to offer it as a competitive advantage over other laptops, and second, the ability to sell the part as an accessory – the Fujitsu Seimens example we were shown retails for about $480 USD. It sounds like the laptop manufacturers will sell these XGP boxes themselves, though I'm sure we'll see the usual ATI partners selling their own versions of the boxes (HIS, Sapphire, VisionTek, etc.).

Because this is an ATI solution, they're holding an exclusive over it for a period of one year, starting in August 2008. I'm not sure if that's an exclusive over the XGP boxes themselves, or over the technology itself - meaning that once the ports start appearing on laptops, we might see NVIDIA-based boxes. There were also no specifics given on when we might see laptops with this technology coming out, but I'd say early 2009 would be an optimistic guess.