[clug] Modern laptops, nVidia, Optimus and Linux

Hugh Fisher hugh.fisher at anu.edu.au
Wed May 4 19:03:40 MDT 2011


David Austin wrote:
> <if I ran the world>
> I must say I'm surprised by the while DisplayPort/Thunderbolt thing.
> I'm all for higher communication speeds as a general rule, but I
> don't understand why they don't restructure the system to eliminate
> the difficult high-bandwidth link.
> 
> The graphics "card" should be integrated with the monitor.
> </if I ran the world>

Putting the graphics card in the monitor would increase the
bandwidth required, not decrease it. PCIe 2 with 16 lines
is 64Gbits/sec, DisplayPort only needs 17Gbits/sec. Some
graphical/number crunching programs prefer having two cards
available.

Pumping out pixels is a nice predictable data stream with
a fixed upper bound determined by monitor resolution and
frame rate. CPU <-> GPU bandwidth is a lot more varied and
the high end is very demanding.

	cheers,
	Hugh


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