eGPU, eCPU, eRAM for Windows 8 Slates?

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shurcooL

[H]ard|Gawd
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This is more of a hypothetical near-future question, rather than a currently-available-only one.

I'm thinking about this specifically in the context of tablet/slate devices with Windows 8 that should be shipping in a year or so. But this applies to ultrabooks/laptops too.

There are already eGPU solutions to some extent. It seems they're limited to 1x PCI Express (rather than 16x) via an ExpressCard, so there's room for improvement. But it generally gets the job done.

Now, can the same concept be applied to CPUs and RAM?

The vision I see is that you have your tablet with modest mid-range specs (say a Core i5 with Intel 3000 graphics). You dock it, and it suddenly gets additional (or replacement) Core i7 quad core with extra ram, and a fast dedicated graphics card. Obviously with a desktop external monitor, keyboard and mouse attached.

The benefit of this solution over having a tablet and a desktop PC is that you can always undock your tablet and take it with you, so that all your currently running applications keep their running state.

So, from a technological POV, can this be done in the next couple of years?
 
As a side note, I think this would be an excellent game-changer use of Thunderbolt connections.

Imagine if the Thunderbolt Display [Pro] by Apple also had a eGPU (and potentially eCPU+eRAM) that took over when you hooked up a MacBook Air to it?
 
Wow, kinda surprised that no one at the [H]ard forum has interest in this topic...

I've thought more about it, and realized there might be a problem with the concept of eRAM. First of all, any kind of RAM has to be very close to the CPU to be useful, in terms of distance as well as bandwidth.

But the main problem with eRAM might be that when you want to undock your tablet, it would have to transfer over all the memory contents into the internal RAM (or swap space), which might not be instantaneous. Since RAM is fast, it might be acceptable, but still. You'd have to indicate when you're about to undock it, or else it would crash.
 
There's little interest in Windows tablets here at the moment primarily because of cost.

But what you speak of I think does have potential significance and is a strength of Windows in that one device can serve as the only computing device that anyone would ever need. However with Ivy Bridge on the way, I'm not so sure how many people would even need such and external docking system except for high end gaming. I can plug my Sandy Bridge Samsung Series 7 Slate into its dock today and it allows for an external monitor, drives, keyboard and mouse to used and the HD 3000 does provide enough power to do a lot except game but even then there is some lower end gaming capability there. Through Metro games into the mix and a lot of people will be gaming on the IGP just fine though I have no idea at the moment what those games will look like.

I think a more important capability will be folding keyboard docks. Ivy Bridge Windows 8 slates and ultrabooks will be based on the same compute hardware and a folding dock Ivy Bridge Windows 8 slate and you have a tablet and a laptop all in one.
 
The way you put it is a bit pointless, because if you have a CPU, GPU, RAM in the dock, it is already almost a complete PC by itself. Then your tablet is not being extended, it actually is the extension to that PC, an external display of sorts.

Another thing is, we are still going to want the fast CPU, GPU etc in the tablet even when it is undocked. I guess you'll just have to spend some time playing EVE Online, Civ 5, etc. on a tablet in bed to understand what I mean.
And we are at a point where we can actually have it. I've had it with my TM2 for a while now, though at a quite different form factor than your expectation with its 2kg weight. But today's tech has even greater potential. The Sandy Bridge integrated GPU matched the dedicated one in my TM2, Ivy Bridge is even better. Atoms are still a lot behind, but AMD Brazos is a good alternative. We just need some manufacturer to finally use them in decent tablets.

2011 had a lot of promise but turned out a dud. For pure slates, ep121 was quite a disappointment for not using Sandy Bridge despite the perfect timing of its launch, and the Acer and MSI Brazos options are lacking active digitizers... the MSI 110w isn't even available in my region. Convertibles on the other hand stayed exorbitantly priced, but because of the lack of alternatives I would have still gotten one... decided that the T901 with dedicated GPU is the best one but it too wasn't available in my region.

Here's to hoping for 2012 to fix things up.
 
The way Ivy Bridge and later chips are being rated might be close to what you seek in certain devices.

The chips may be thermal rated to say 13-17W in a thin/light/ultrabook/tablet form factor, but when plugged into a dock (with enhanced cooling), work at speeds allowed by a 35/45W power envelope. Intel described this a few months ago: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4764/ivy-bridge-configurable-tdp-detailed

That won't address the amount of memory or GPU of course. The percentage of people wanting more than 8GB of RAM in a laptop this year is probably fairly small. I do wish there was an easier way to add external GPUs. ThunderBolt should make it cleaner to add, but the bandwidth is still only about half what PCIe 2.0 x16 provides. And a TB<->PCIe bridge will likely rob some performance as well.
 
georgir said:
2011 had a lot of promise but turned out a dud. For pure slates, ep121 was quite a disappointment for not using Sandy Bridge despite the perfect timing of its launch, and the Acer and MSI Brazos options are lacking active digitizers...
Click to expand...

The EP121 was simply too early for Sandy Bridge, it came out in January 2011, I don't think and Sandy Bridge could have been available for that release time. The Samsung Series 7 Slate did use SB and it's a much better device than the EP121, I have both.
 
heatlesssun said:
The EP121 was simply too early for Sandy Bridge, it came out in January 2011, I don't think and Sandy Bridge could have been available for that release time. The Samsung Series 7 Slate did use SB and it's a much better device than the EP121, I have both.
Click to expand...

There were other SB laptops in retail by the middle of January. In fact the EP121 releast was timed so well with the SB launch that a lot of people were speculating it will use a SB CPU before the specs were announced. Asus really has no excuse.
As for the Samsung Slate, it launched way too late, when Ivy Bridge was already on the horizon, so I would not have bought it even if it were available in my region.
 
georgir said:
There were other SB laptops in retail by the middle of January. In fact the EP121 releast was timed so well with the SB launch that a lot of people were speculating it will use a SB CPU before the specs were announced. Asus really has no excuse.
As for the Samsung Slate, it launched way too late, when Ivy Bridge was already on the horizon, so I would not have bought it even if it were available in my region.
Click to expand...

I don't believe that there were any ULV SB devices until well after January,
 
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