As Apple had teamed up with Intel to release "ThunderBolt" the new I/O port, which was meant for fast transfer speeds up to 10gbps, they had released this port on many Macintoshes. This port looks promising and hopefully many third party manufacturers will release devices for this Thunderbolt Port. From the looks of it right now many of these devices will be geared towards high end users. But apart from using the Thunderbolt port with peripherals, Sony had decided to take this a step further. This was what many people had dreamed of the Thunderbolt Port being used as and that was an external graphics card. Sony has released a new laptop with integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics, but apart from that they also included a media dock for a DVD drive and a AMD Radeon HD 6650M graphics chip. Once plugged into the the Thunderbolt port, users will be able to make use of the graphics card to it's full potential.
If we take a look at Apple's products that have integrated graphics such as the 13" Macbook Pro, Macbook and Mac mini. People might get the idea that someday a manufacturer will release an external graphics card/ dock which can be plugged in and used with these devices. Granted that the Macbook and Mac mini don't have Thunderbolt ports yet, it looks likely they will have them very soon. So imagine a machine as small as the Mac mini being able to drive a powerful graphics card and potentially turning into a gamer's computer. The assurance is that it will not be cheap to buy external graphics, but for die hard fans that don't like all-in-ones, or choose not to purchase a Mac Pro will find this with great interest.
There are also some negatives about graphics card being hooked up with Thunderbolt, and that goes around the fact that the speed is only 10gbps whereas PCIe slots offer more, therefore making powerful graphics cards which use Thunderbolt, weak and somewhat useless.
This still remains a possibility and a very unique idea, and having this feature on the Mac mini someday can be very good for most users.
Oh SNAP, that's awesome! Thunderbolt is still new technology, and one can only expect that over time, if adopted my masses, the technology will improve and get even faster.
ReplyDeleteI really the like idea of adding a graphics module to a Thunderbolt equipped mac. It will make the mac mini much more attractive to me. I can hook up a matte screen and have some more graphics power
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