Magma expressbox 3T

[MG2R]

Linus just released the unboxing for it and devices like that leave me with a big question: Thunderbolt is 10Gbps, which equals to 1.25GB/s. PCI-e on the other hand is (v2) 0.5GB/s per lane. That means that a single PCI-e 4x slot would saturate the entire Thunderbolt link with ease. How would you like to run high end graphics cards on that interface? Can anyone explain this to me?

Talking about

[ionbasa]

I would imagine there is some sort of PCIe bandwidth management going on, and possibly a PLX PCIe switch.

More info here regarding link agression/management/bandwith: http://www.pcisig.com/developers/main/training_materials/get_document?doc_id=090831b9a2b1210b2822c06e469992d9d028f13d

[TechFan@ic]

Wow ! that's an excellent point , but remember PCIe gen3 4x = PCIE gen1 16x , so it should work just fine , it'll definitely be better than notebook graphics, you can buy a cheapo laptop with onboard graphics and use one of those badboys to run something like a 7870 on it .

[Caparo]

Wow ! that's an excellent point , but remember PCIe gen3 4x = PCIE gen1 16x , so it should work just fine , it'll definitely be better than notebook graphics, you can buy a cheapo laptop with onboard graphics and use one of those badboys to run something like a 7870 on it .

You'll have to buy a very very cheap laptop. Because such an magma thing costs about a 1000 bux, and then you haven't even bought the graphics card itself. At last laptops with thunderbolt ( i don't know if they exist yet ) are not cheap.

[MuZeVII]

I recall Linus saying that it is only PCIe gen2? I could be wrong though. Lucid have been doing some interesting things regarding external GPUs for a while now, take a look at this if you're interested:

[MG2R]

I would imagine there is some sort of PCIe bandwidth management going on' date=' and possibly a PLX PCIe switch. More info here regarding link agression/management/bandwith: [url']http://www.pcisig.com/developers/main/training_materials/get_document?doc_id=090831b9a2b1210b2822c06e469992d9d028f13d

But still... 2xPCIe 8x + 1xPCIe 4x = 10GB/s (assuming gen 2). That is eight times more bandwith than the thunderbolt link. Unless there's some kind of voodoo magic (e.g. somthing I did not know existed, which you may point out to me now) going on, you cannot get that kind of datarates from your laptop to your 3T.