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MillimeterMark In
Jul 1, 2008 12:00 PM
The Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo GraphicBooster is the first product leveraging AMD's recently announced ATI XGP technology. Designed to work with the company's ultra-mobile Amilo Sa 3650 notebook, the Amilo GraphicBooster allows up to three external displays to run simultaneously.
Graphics on the Go
According to the most recent sales reports, laptops are becoming more popular than desktop systems. By 2011, computer-industry analyst firm IDC expects laptops to represent 66 percent of corporate purchases, with 71 percent of consumers opting for a notebook instead of a tower.
But for many creatives, those lightweight road warriors aren't alternatives; they want access to more computing power and storage space than is practical for a laptop.
However, a subtle improvement in a not-very-glamorous part of a computer looks to change that: the speed of its internal bus. By implementing the new bus protocol PCI Express 2.0 over the past year — found in motherboards from makers of PCs and Apple gear alike — breakthrough capabilities in graphics and storage will be available using both workstations and laptops.
This latest update of the PCI standard from prior 1.1 version to 2.0 was announced early last year. Storage-maker Ciprico received a 2007 Digital Content Producer Vanguard Award for its MediaVault 5108 series PCI Express (PCIe) direct-attached storage array — one of the first products to use the new PCI-channel standard.
Avid Technology, which started shipping its new generation of gear this past June, relies on the new PCIe standard as a key element tying together host Mac or PC systems with an outboard I/O connection device that creates a 10Gbps network. According to Avid system designers, the design eliminates lag time in responsiveness that users often experience when working with HD material; the computing bandwidth the interface delivers allows them to evenly disperse the processing of video, audio, and effects across the entire system.
Avid even offers a PCIe-compatible CardBus card, which plugs into laptops to enable the same response in a more portable setup.
New styles of storage become available too. Dulce Systems Pro EX expander switch, for example, expands the number of PCIe slots available for storage. Users of the setup get a card that fits into a Mac or PC and that connects to a standalone seven-slot Dulce box, which can be filled with hard drives. The resulting DAS (direct-attached storage) system is as speedy as if the drives were installed into the original computer.
Graphics on the go won't suffer either. At June's Computex, AMD announced ATI XGP (eXternal Graphics Platform) technology, a new external PCI Express 2.0 graphics platform designed to deliver “enthusiast-class” desktop graphic performance and “true multimedia upgradeability” to notebooks, according to a press release. A newly developed cable connects an AMD Turion-powered notebook to an externally powered and cooled device that holds a separate ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3870 graphics card. The result: a powerful graphics rig with up to 4GBs in each direction in graphics bandwidth, enabling it to handle multiple monitors.
The first product announced that's using the new technology is the Amilo GraphicBooster from Fujitsu-Siemens. Designed to work with the company's ultra-mobile Amilo Sa 3650 notebook, the device allows up to three external displays to run simultaneously.
“Until now, only desktop systems — not notebooks — have been open and unlimited platforms,” says Stan Ossias, AMD's director of marketing for notebook GPUs. “This opens up the notebook platform for high-end graphics and other applications.”
The Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo GraphicBooster is the first product leveraging AMD's recently announced ATI XGP technology. Designed to work with the company's ultra-mobile Amilo Sa 3650 notebook, the Amilo GraphicBooster allows up to three external displays to run simultaneously.
