Surface Book 2 and Alienware eGPU questions. How do they get around the bandwidth issues?

[Elfin10]

Hey everyone. Been watching linus for a few years, but never really thought to join the site. After trying to find a good tech oriented discord, I finally gave up and decided on joining the site only to find that LTT has a discord channel as well.

 

I've got a few questions about the workings of the Surface Book 2 and the Alienware eGPU. 

 

It's largely the same, but it seems that both of these devices are able to more or less get around the bandwidth limit of TB3. For Alienware, they used their own dedicated PCIe port for it, which comes with some down sides, but the performance seems incredible. The question for the Alienware situation: Is this set up able to be replicated on other systems? For instance, if ASUS or MSI wanted to use their own cable for this type of situation, what would be stopping them, other than the fact that it may cost R&D and/or further fragmenting the port for the market. Couldn't you build a system to use Alienware's port?

 

Secondly, for the Surface Book, the dGPU is in the keyboard, which I think is an awesome idea, but again, how does that get around the bottleneck that TB3 has? Obviously, it's got a different connection than TB3, but/how does that connection work?

 

I fear my questions may be impossible to answer simply because they are all developed in house and the exact function would be private knowledge.

 

Cheers!