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ATI has announced a new solution for laptops whose GPUs can’t handle graphics intensive games or applications. XGP is an external graphics enhancement device containing one or more graphics cards that will be housed in a separate chassis. According to ATI and their partner in the venture, Fujitsu, you simply bring your boring old work-a-day laptop home, plug it into the XGP using special cables, jack the XGP into up to four monitors and you have a high powered gaming machine or a professional video editing suite or a full featured home theater server…or all three.

The XGP is being announced now to coincide with ATI’s release of their next gen mobile GPU, the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3800.

Shane McGlaun at Dailytech said this about the XGP:

A specially designed PCIe 2.0 self-attaching cable connects the XGP to the notebook. The cable is designed by Japan Aviation Electronics Industry, Limited. The graphics muscle from the HD 3870 should allow users to buy a lower performance notebook including ultra portable units and then attach the ATI XGP for gaming.

UMPCs too? Dayum….

Technical details, laptop requirements, availability dates and price have yet to be filled in but I am VERY excited by the concept. I have coaxed every last bit of power from the 64MB of my Radeon Mobile 9600 and was beginning to despair of ever playing Halo at work. Hope, and rocket launchers, spring eternal apparently.

See more details on this story at Extreme Tech.

Zealot (446 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).