Gottabemobile.com tells us of a new platform that AMD is introducing. XGP (eXternal Graphics Platform) as AMD calls it, is a sort of external graphics card platform that will hook into laptops (and potentially other computer hardware; *cough* netbooks *cough*) and enable them to make use of desktop quality graphics cards. Of course this will enable a lower powered computer to handle more graphically intensive applications while hooked up to the external box.

You might find it surprising, as I did, that AMD is not actually making the box with the graphics card in it, (if I’m reading this correctly) instead they will be making the software that enables the computer to distribute the load to the video card box, then output it to an external monitor. OEMs will apparently be making the box that contains the graphics cards. This sounds like a good idea and probably wouldn’t be possible if they weren’t using the PCIe interface. PCIe is an expansion card interface that is often found in desktop computers. By using PCIe instead of say, USB, they are able to pipe information through fast enough to make an external graphics card a practical idea. Bluetooth, USB, and other connectivity options would bottleneck way before the graphics card was functioning at full capacity. Of course this means the hardware that you use this external graphics platform with will need to have a PCIe slot most likely coupled to a special XGP connector in order to interface with the box. The box will surely be externally powered.

It would be interesting to see a netbook with XGP capabilities, you could take your netbook out for the day with you and have a good companion for web browsing or writing, then come home and hook up to the XGP box and be able to do more advanced activities such as gaming or heavy multimedia editing. I wonder what the card boxes will end up like. It would be very cool if they were user upgradable, and you could plug in any PCIe graphics card. If a netbook bottlenecks at the CPU while taking advantage of the external graphics processing I wouldn’t call it far fetched to say that it may be possible to offload some of the CPU processing to the graphics card, it all depends on whether there is a line back from the external box for that sort of thing.