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Village Instruments to develop external Thunderbolt graphics card

by Steven Sande Aug 4th 2011 at 3:30PM

Do you want the sleek, aluminum goodness of a new MacBook Air with awe-inspiring graphics performance? Then you're in luck, because Village Instruments is starting development of a Thunderbolt-based version of their ViDock, an external graphics card enclosure.

The CEO of Village Instruments, Hubert Chen, put a post on Facebook last week to see how many customers would potentially be interested in such a product. In the post, Chen noted that the company would begin production if 50 people responded positively about the ViDock. As of today, there are well over 350 comments, so Chen gave the project a go-ahead.

The existing ViDock uses an ExpressCard interface to connect to a PCI Express graphics card enclosure. Thunderbolt provides about 4 times the amount of bandwidth as ExpressCard and performance should be excellent as a result.

There's no word on when the new product will be out of the labs and available for sale, nor did Village Instruments provide a hint on pricing. The existing ViDock line ranges from US$199 to $279 depending on the model selected -- power requirements for the graphics cards are the differentiating factor.



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Daniel Swanson

Very interesting.

I'm guessing that Apple is hoping that third-party companies will use this type of format for expansion cards--for those who need and want such.

That way, a new Mac Pro might be designed with a completely different form factor which is more modular, not to mention a LOT smaller. This would seem to appease all those crying for a "mid-sized tower." So a new Pro may include a lot of cores and a lot of memory slots, but no expansion slots, while relying on its Thunderbolt bus for that.

I've never needed and expansion cards, but I've long needed more cores and memory for 3D modeling and rendering. Such a machine would be a long time dream come true.

August 04 2011 at 6:06 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
MacMike

wondering if it is going to be fast enough over thunderbolt, read once that thunderbolt is not as fast as a build in pci-e slot so it will not get the full power from an external graphics card. is that true?

August 04 2011 at 3:57 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to MacMike's comment
Brandon Rotkel

It's true, but not as much of a problem as you might think, hopefully. Thunderbolt should have about the same amount of bandwidth as a 4x PCI-e slot. Current high-end cards are 16x. You'd probably think that means you're losing out on 12x the performance, but in reality, running a 16x card in a 4x PCI-e slot results in only about a 5-20% loss in framerate. This is because the data that needs to travel to the card isn't a huge bottleneck right now, since there's usually a pretty limited amount that the card needs to get from the CPU to do the calculations that are done on the GPU. If you had two 2x slots instead of a single 4x slot, there would be even less of a performance drop.

However, how well it performs in reality is still something that will remain to be seen and we can't say for sure if it's worth while until some of these Thunderbolt enclosures come out and we can benchmark them.

August 04 2011 at 5:00 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Brandon Rotkel's comment
David

I suspect the results will be highly variable and not as good as may be possible. There are many factors at work so I suspect that platform specific testing would be needed.

Contention is one thing to look out for. So far Apple has implemented TB two and possibly three different ways. If the TB chip has to go through the North Bridge the performance is likely to differ from having a connection to SB's built in ports. The same thing goes if there are any other devices on the TB bus.

For general Mac usage you are right it probably won't make much difference though that can now be said about built in GPUs. The problem is this if you are going to spend all that money will you be willing to put up with a 20 to 50% loss in performance? Especially when we now have a nice Mini with a good GPU?

I'm not knocking the idea of an external chassis but rather the idea of putting an external GPU in it. Sure it will work, but is it a good value? Time will tell but I suspect the results will be very configuration specific.

August 05 2011 at 1:38 PM Report abuse rate up rate down
MacMike

i am just wondering if thunderbolt is fast enough for graphic cards. i mean i read once that thunderbolt is not as fast as a built in pci-e slot. is it true?

August 04 2011 at 3:56 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to MacMike's comment
MacMike

sorry for double post! :(

August 04 2011 at 3:57 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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