Phone as an eGPU?

[DiamondSzklanka]

So I have a Dell latitude E6530 laptop that I upgraded a lot and it has:
16GB RAM DDR3 1600Mhz 

2 SSDs (256+960GB)

i7-3940XM

intel graphics 4000

 

 

I  also have a Xiaomi redmi note 11 pro 5g with a snapdragon 695, 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. Also keep in mind that this phone was just released 2-3 months ago so it's pretty new.

 

Now intel graphics is what I want to focus on. Recently while doing some benchmarks on my phone I noticed how good the gpu is compared to my intel graphics 4000. And I thought "hey, why don't I use my phone as an external gpu?" And so I wonder, is this even possible? 
Now, it may be possible since I have an expresscard slot in my laptop via which apparently you can plug an external gpu. I even have an egpu adapter but none of my friends' external gpus worked for me unfortunately. These were mostly some old gpus tho, from 10 years ago or more. But if I manage to at least try to do that with my phone I don't really have anything to lose right? I mean, I don't want to buy a gpu just to learn that it doesn't work. And I guess I can do the phone egpu thing without losing much money (I only need to buy a expresscard to usb-c adapter if it even exists).

 

I also tried searching about this topic on the internet but haven't had much luck. I only found one forum post where a guy said that it's not possible and the other said that it is possible but would require a lot of work and USB-c speed would be only good enough on some newer phones but that last post was from 3 years ago so I think that I should be good now.

 

Also please do not tell me to get a new laptop/pc. I WON'T get a new laptop because these newer ones are not upgradeable, are ugly and I am just unable to use them (I won't go into details for now but yeah there's no way I'm getting a new laptop). I also can't get a new pc because for some reason my parents won't let me? I'm not sure what the reason is but nonetheless I want to stick to my current laptop for as long as possible and then maybe buy a new pc. Also, I'm 15 so I'm not exactly able to move out yet so for now I'm stuck with my parents. Also I'm broke af and I barely had enough money to upgrade my laptop

[Levent]

3 minutes ago, DiamondSzklanka said:

it's not possible and the other said that it is possible but would require a lot of work and USB-c speed would be only good enough on some newer phones but that last post was from 3 years ago so I think that I should be good now.

Nope still not possible and still REALLY hard.

 

Not gonna happen.

[JKRsega]

I've never heard of such a thing. 10/10 for hoping though.  

[Eigenvektor]

7 minutes ago, DiamondSzklanka said:

Recently while doing some benchmarks on my phone I noticed how good the gpu is compared to my intel graphics 4000.

Are you sure those benchmarks are measuring the exact same thing? Same resolution, detail level etc. Cause I find it hard to believe a mobile GPU outperforms a desktop component, even something as weak as an iGPU.

 

The GPU in a phone is a lot smaller and has much tighter constraints when it comes to power supply and cooling. Even if it was technically possible to connect it as an eGPU, I don't think it would work that well, especially under sustained loads (e.g. gaming for several hours)

[thekingofmonks]

4 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

Are you sure those benchmarks are measuring the exact same thing? Same resolution, detail level etc. Cause I find it hard to believe a mobile GPU outperforms a desktop component, even something as weak as an iGPU.

 

The GPU in a phone is a lot smaller and has much tighter constraints when it comes to power supply and cooling. Even if it was technically possible to connect it as an eGPU, I don't think it would work that well, especially under sustained loads (e.g. gaming for several hours)

I am fairly certain that the s695 's gpu can outperform an HD 4000.

 

That said, the benchmarks do need to be the same for a direct comparison. Not just in terms of graphics config but also the api.

[thekingofmonks]

Some kind of GPU passthrough thing that we won't see before a Github geek actually does something like this.

[Eigenvektor]

16 minutes ago, thekingofmonks said:

I am fairly certain that the s695 's gpu can outperform an HD 4000.

Interesting. I assume you would still need better cooling than a phone can provide to prevent it from thermal throttling?

 

~edit: So after a bit of searching, the Snapdragon 695 (Adreno 619 GPU) supposedly has 536 Gigaflops, while the HD 4000 has 268.8 Gflops. Unfortunately it doesn't mention whether this is for FP32 as well.

 

So at least on paper it should be twice as fast. Assuming you can make full use of it when running over a bandwidth constrained connection and it doesn't overheat and downclock itself.

 

 

14 minutes ago, thekingofmonks said:

Some kind of GPU passthrough thing that we won't see before a Github geek actually does something like this.

I'm sure it's theoretically possible, but you'd need to write drivers on the PC side of things, which is hard enough without official documentation. But you'd also have to (I assume) modify the phone's firmware/OS to support it, which would make this even harder.

[Poinkachu]

Considering the advancement of DIY community.
And considering the GPUpocalypse awhile ago.

If it's a viable option, someone would've done it already.
Then after that there'd be various kind of adapters or whatever at aliexpress.

[zzlttzz]

 

1 hour ago, DiamondSzklanka said:

So I have a Dell latitude E6530 laptop that I upgraded a lot and it has:
16GB RAM DDR3 1600Mhz 

2 SSDs (256+960GB)

i7-3940XM

intel graphics 4000

 

 

I  also have a Xiaomi redmi note 11 pro 5g with a snapdragon 695, 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. Also keep in mind that this phone was just released 2-3 months ago so it's pretty new.

 

Now intel graphics is what I want to focus on. Recently while doing some benchmarks on my phone I noticed how good the gpu is compared to my intel graphics 4000. And I thought "hey, why don't I use my phone as an external gpu?" And so I wonder, is this even possible? 
Now, it may be possible since I have an expresscard slot in my laptop via which apparently you can plug an external gpu. I even have an egpu adapter but none of my friends' external gpus worked for me unfortunately. These were mostly some old gpus tho, from 10 years ago or more. But if I manage to at least try to do that with my phone I don't really have anything to lose right? I mean, I don't want to buy a gpu just to learn that it doesn't work. And I guess I can do the phone egpu thing without losing much money (I only need to buy a expresscard to usb-c adapter if it even exists).

 

I also tried searching about this topic on the internet but haven't had much luck. I only found one forum post where a guy said that it's not possible and the other said that it is possible but would require a lot of work and USB-c speed would be only good enough on some newer phones but that last post was from 3 years ago so I think that I should be good now.

 

Also please do not tell me to get a new laptop/pc. I WON'T get a new laptop because these newer ones are not upgradeable, are ugly and I am just unable to use them (I won't go into details for now but yeah there's no way I'm getting a new laptop). I also can't get a new pc because for some reason my parents won't let me? I'm not sure what the reason is but nonetheless I want to stick to my current laptop for as long as possible and then maybe buy a new pc. Also, I'm 15 so I'm not exactly able to move out yet so for now I'm stuck with my parents. Also I'm broke af and I barely had enough money to upgrade my laptop

Linus you should hire this guy immediately, let the man dream come true.

[Devryd]

There is just no way to connect a phone to a PC with even close enough bandwith for that to be possible. 

[Unedited_Mind]

You are off your head if you think a mobile phone GPU is anywhere close to capable as even a GT 710 on PC.

[thekingofmonks]

2 hours ago, Eigenvektor said:

Interesting. I assume you would still need better cooling than a phone can provide to prevent it from thermal throttling?

No, not necessarily.

But for the phone to perform at its full potential, it certainly needs much better cooling than thin aluminium, and then we can start raising the power limits and other things.

[DiamondSzklanka]

22 hours ago, Eigenvektor said:

Are you sure those benchmarks are measuring the exact same thing? Same resolution, detail level etc. Cause I find it hard to believe a mobile GPU outperforms a desktop component, even something as weak as an iGPU.

 

The GPU in a phone is a lot smaller and has much tighter constraints when it comes to power supply and cooling. Even if it was technically possible to connect it as an eGPU, I don't think it would work that well, especially under sustained loads (e.g. gaming for several hours)

I don't think so but I think it's pretty obvious that a 2012 low/medium spec gpu (also integrated) is worse than a 2022 gpu even if it's supposed to be a mobile gpu. Like, there's a 10 year difference and seeing how much better phones are now I think it's a visible difference (not sure how to explain that but yeah :"D)

[DiamondSzklanka]

22 hours ago, Eigenvektor said:

Interesting. I assume you would still need better cooling than a phone can provide to prevent it from thermal throttling?

 

~edit: So after a bit of searching, the Snapdragon 695 (Adreno 619 GPU) supposedly has 536 Gigaflops, while the HD 4000 has 268.8 Gflops. Unfortunately it doesn't mention whether this is for FP32 as well.

 

So at least on paper it should be twice as fast. Assuming you can make full use of it when running over a bandwidth constrained connection and it doesn't overheat and downclock itself.

 

 

I'm sure it's theoretically possible, but you'd need to write drivers on the PC side of things, which is hard enough without official documentation. But you'd also have to (I assume) modify the phone's firmware/OS to support it, which would make this even harder.

Yeah I heard that egpus usually have ~50-95% of their normal performance so in a worst case scenario, nothing will change ig?

[DiamondSzklanka]

21 hours ago, Unedited_Mind said:

You are off your head if you think a mobile phone GPU is anywhere close to capable as even a GT 710 on PC.

Dude, I'm comparing a 2012 integrated gpu to a 2022 mobile gpu, it should at least be a little faster, don't you think?

[DiamondSzklanka]

19 hours ago, thekingofmonks said:

No, not necessarily.

But for the phone to perform at its full potential, it certainly needs much better cooling than thin aluminium, and then we can start raising the power limits and other things.

Yeah but cooling is a separate issue altogether

[DiamondSzklanka]

Ok so I searched up some expresscard to usb c adapters, turns out the only thing I can find is expresscard -> USB 3.1 

both have the bandwidth of 5Gb/s so if I find a usb -> usb c cable that supports at least 5Gb/s and my phone also supports it I should be good when it comes to the bandwidth. Also, I'm aware that I should probably root my phone first to do this. I haven't done it yet but I could if necessary

[jaslion]

22 hours ago, Unedited_Mind said:

You are off your head if you think a mobile phone GPU is anywhere close to capable as even a GT 710 on PC.

Youd be like extremelt surprised with the amount of power modern day phones have. Like the latest iphone goes beyond a gt 1030 in gpu power

[DiamondSzklanka]

2 hours ago, jaslion said:

Youd be like extremelt surprised with the amount of power modern day phones have. Like the latest iphone goes beyond a gt 1030 in gpu power

True and if you compare a 10 year old integrated GPU to a few months old mobile GPU I'm pretty sure the newer GPU will be better

[Eigenvektor]

6 hours ago, DiamondSzklanka said:

Yeah I heard that egpus usually have ~50-95% of their normal performance so in a worst case scenario, nothing will change ig?

An eGPU is typically connected with Thunderbolt. Connecting your phone with USB won't get anywhere close to that bandwidth. So likely much closer to a 50% performance drop or even more. Couldn't find any benchmarks on how fast the phone's USB port works.

 

Then you have the issue that your phone has no HDMI or DisplayPort output, meaning you can't connect it to a screen directly. So the image would have to be sent back to the PC over the same USB connection and then forwarded to e.g. the motherboards connectors. That'll probably eat up additional performance.

 

On the software side of things, you'd need custom firmware on the phone that exposes the GPU over USB. You'd most likely need to build your own Android ROM and reverse engineer Qualcomm's drivers to make that possible. And repeat that for any additional phone model you want to support.

 

Once you have that, you also need drivers on the Windows side that exposes the GPU to Windows and can communicate with the GPU on the phone, receive the rendered image, then forward the image to the computers GPU/iGPU, to use as an output device. That's a ton of development effort.

[OhYou_]

there is absolutely no way this will ever work. 

who cares about the connection, the bandwidth, any of that.
The phone itself lacks any hardware support in the cpu for directed IO to even pass the gpu.
 

[Guest]

By the time you got a phone hot wired to a pc for graphics and all the bull shit in between for a feature that probably won't really work to the expectations .....

 

You could just buy pretty much any 50 to 100$ video card, slap it in when the parents aren't looking and be done. Time = shipping + 10 minutes installation.

 

Hot wire phone to pc for graphics = unknown amount of time. But might be a cool video suggestion for Linus and his team to try and conjure something up. They at least have the resources to pull it off.