Wireless PCIe To Enable Remote Graphics Cards

[Cerulean]

Source: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/07/14/212204/Wireless-PCIe-To-Enable-Remote-Graphics-Cards

J. Dzhugashvili writes "If you read Slashdot, odds are you already know about WiGig and the 7Gbps wireless networking it promises. The people at Atheros and Wilocity are now working on an interesting application for the spec: wireless PCI Express. In a nutshell, wPCIe enables a PCI Express switch with local and remote components linked by a 60GHz connection. The first applications, which will start sampling next year, will let you connect your laptop to a base station with all kinds of storage controllers, networking controllers, and yes, an external graphics processor. wPCIe works transparently to the operating system, which only sees additional devices connected over PCI Express. And as icing on the cake, wPCie controllers will lets you connect to standard Wi-Fi networks, too."

Ideas anyone? Sharing a GPU platform across multiple laptops; laptops with built-in Wireless PCI-E controllers (to replace PCMCIA and ExpressCard); reduce heat on mainboard while having a somewhat decent and serious, standalone GPU...

 

[defaultluser]

The limiting factor here is, 7Gbps, which is NOT bidirectional (it's shared wireless). So expect to get perhaps 3-4 Gbps real bandwidth out of this thing (less if you take into account packet loss).

ExpressCard 1 is 2.5 Gbps bidirectional, and ExpressCard 2 is 5.0 Gbps bidirectional. This doesn't sound like much of an improvement.

Also, from the whitepaper:

A reliable wPCIe connection can be maintained with a relatively low data rate channel. However, to achieve meaningful performance between local and remote devices, the data rate needs to be on the order of 2 Gbps, or that of a single lane of PCIe. The only practical wireless channel that can support this capacity is 60 GHz.

So much for that.

EDIT: What I think we really need here is to double the lanes on ExpressCard. Nobody takes ExpressCard seriously because there's not enough bandwidth for an external graphics card, let-alone extra bandwidth to send rendered images back to the internal GPU for display on the built-in screen. PCIe 1.0 x2 is pretty lean on bandwidth, but it will get you 75% performance, even on modern cards. And with PCIe 2.0 x2, you could run even high-end cards at 80-90% performance (extrapolating from those linked results). Now THAT is an expansion port worth paying for.

Unfortunately, the only ExpressPort out today is the finicky 1.0 edition with 2.5 Gbps, and there are no plans to increase the width of the link. And builders are not very excited about ExpressCard 2 because it requires the (still power-hungry) USB 3.0.