HEXUS Lassos ATI
Portable computers can compete quite well against desktops in terms of performance, even at the high end, if you like your laptop heavy, but one area where they slip behind is graphics. Not any more, if ATI's Lasso can deliver what we think it can.
Fitting one, let alone two high end graphics cards into a laptop, and then powering them is, well... a bit of a bugger. What would be really cool is if the GPUs could be housed externally, interfacing with the laptop rather than residing within it. "But wait Steve, we've already seen such a solution" you shout, yes? Indeed theASUS XG station strives to do that for lappies with ExpressCard slots. ATI's working on a little something of its own, however.
They're calling it Lasso and it'll go a bit further than having an external graphics card for a laptop. Lasso will be able to house multiple graphics boards providing what could frankly prove to be hilarious processing capabilities... and those of you keeping up with the GPGPU scene will know that it's not about games performance. Modern GPUs can do some serious general purpose wet-work, leaving the CPU cores to work on other things.
Details right now are scarce, but imagine having a pair of R600s plugged into your laptop, or indeed augmenting a small form factor PC, or a workstation...
"But Steve, we want pics!" OK then, folks, here's a look at some naked lasso currently in development:
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ASUS XG station
ASUS had a number of interesting products to show but the one that really caught our eye was the XG Station - an external graphics card case for laptop users!
The easy bit is install a PCIe graphics card inside but what's needed is a compatible notebook for the XG to connect to - one equipped with a new ExpressCard slot.
That slot hooks up to the notebook's core logic via a PCIe x1 conduit. The graphics card within the XG is then connected to an external monitor and away you go. One thing we're not sure about is quite how much the comparatively low-bandwidth interconnect saps performance.
ASUS was showing a sample equipped with one of its own NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS cards - the fastest currently approved. The Station's LED screen can highlight, among other things, current GPU speed and gaming FPS. Turning the knob allows you to overclock the GPU, too. The sample we saw, though, was running pretty darn hot, so we reckon that ASUS may need to beef up the cooling for the box.
Above you can see the card's left-hand graphics output is being fed out to a monitor (white plug).
The XG also features a USB2.0 hub and Dolby Headphone Technology that creates pseudo 5.1-channel sound when any pair of headphones is connected.
At first, ASUS will only be selling the XG Station in a bundle that includes its own GeForce 7900GS graphics card. We don't know the price as yet but do expect to see the package in the channel in Q2 this year.
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