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Earlier this year Lenovo announced plans to launch its first laptops with OCuLink ports with support for data transfer speeds up to 64 Gbps, as well as its first graphics dock that lets you use those high-speed ports to pair a desktop graphics card with a laptop.
Now the company has launched the Lenovo ThinkBook TGX graphics dock in China, where it sells for CNY 1,499 (or a little over $200).
While it’s unclear if or when you’ll be able to get your hands on this graphics dock, now that it’s available in China we have a better idea of what kind of features it supports.
Up until recently most external graphics docks have leveraged Thunderbolt or USB4 connections with support for speeds up to 40 Gbps. This year handheld gaming PC makers GPD and One Netbook released a pair of compact docks with OCuLink support. But both the GPD G1 and ONEXGPU are compact eGPUs with built-in AMD Radeon RX 7600M XT mobile GPUs. That means they offer the kind of performance you’d get from a decent gaming laptop, but there’s no ability to use a desktop graphics card or replace the built-in GPU with one from NVIDIA or Intel, for example.
Lenovo’s solution, meanwhile, is basically a case with a set of ports and connectors that allows you to use it to connect any recent desktop graphics card to laptops, mini PCs, handhelds, or other devices with OCuLink connectors. Well, nearly any recent card – Lenovo notes that in order to fit inside the case, cards can’t measure larger than 358mm in length or 72mm in width. And the company specifically notes that the ThinkBook TGX dock supports NVIDIA RTX 3000 and 4000 series graphics cards, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work with AMD or Intel GPUs as well.
The dock itself measures 384 x 210 x 192mm (15.1″ x 8.3″ x 7.6″) and features an aluminum body with a PCIe connector for you to supply your own graphics card and a fan with diameters up to 120mm and thickness up to 25mm). Lenovo also recommends using an 850W ATX power supply.
Technically Lenovo doesn’t call this an OCuLink dock. Instead, the company says it has a TGX (or “ThinkBook Graphics Extension”) connector. But TGX is basically the company’s word for OCuLink, which extend the PCIe 4×4 interface that’s usually only used for internal components to let you run a high-speed data cable between two devices.
Lenovo’s TGX docking station only officially supports two laptops. In China they’re called the Lenovo ThinkBook 14+ and Lenovo ThinkBook 16+, but in North America Lenovo has said the dock will work with the ThinkBook G14 i Gen 6+ (which appears to basically be the American version of the 14+).
But I suspect the graphics dock should work with just about any computer with an OCuLink port, including some recent GPD and ONEXPLAYER handhelds and mini PCs like the AOOSTAR Gem12 and MINISFORUM EliteMini UM780 XTX.
via ITHome and VideoCardz
The author wrote “But I suspect the graphics dock should work with just about any computer with an OCuLink port”
IMHO this is wishful thinking as a reality check lets me rather believe that this dock uses a proprietary plug, because it would not make any sense that Lenovo put money on the R&D and manufacturing for this eGPU dock, and to then lose their chance to get more revenue by not making it exclusive to their own laptops.
looking at the picture I was unrealistically hoping that this was going to be for a room temp quantum computer by Lenovo, it has the toaster oven form factor…
How did they manage the security flaw from Oculink about having direct access to a PCIe into the machine motherboard instead of a controller like Thunderbolt?
Lenovo decided on OCuLink very late. It is good for people who currently use this standard.
Lenovo should know that tomorrow (soon) OCuLink will be dead – after AMD announced the use of the latest standards in next year’s CPUs:
This is about the upcoming Stix Halo, where USB4 80Gbps with DP2.1 (UHBR20) will be used. This will definitely outclass OCuLink (slower and requires payment for licenses).
I don’t know (or really care enough to get into an argument) about it being a dead end for sure, but they definitely should have given this thing the ability to connect over USB4 as a second option.
The PC Market is rife with political issues. If someone had the proper vision, we could have had great things. But instead they’re bickering and penny-pinching and trying to survive whilst ripping off the consumer.
For example, Intel could have pushed for handhelds back when they had a tremendous lead in 2015. We could’ve had 20W Handhelds with 4x Core Skylake processors, clocked to around 2.5-3.0Gz on their 14nm node. And these handhelds, tablets, and “ultra”-books could have slid and docked into a Box. This Box could have fast-charged the mobile device, it could have let them clock the CPU higher, provided extra cooling, and lastly it could have had a slot for a dGPU.
Apple was toying with the idea for a decade, they didn’t move that way because they have a different financial strategy. But not PC Market.
We could have had a collaboration between Intel, Microsoft, and Nvidia. And had these affordable, profitable, and good-value end products for consumers as early as 2015. They’re too pig-headed and blinded to go that route.
Well, then who else?
How about the likes of ASUS and AMD. They’re respectable companies and if the big guns didn’t do the above, well, they surely could have. It wouldn’t have been “as good” but let me paint the picture. It’s 2018, you can get an 8x Core Zen1 processor, it’s clocked at 25W running at 2.5GHz based on an inferior 16nm node. The iGPU is a lowly Vega-8 for obvious reasons. And it could be implemented into mobile devices such as handhelds, tablets, and laptops. It too would slide and dock into a TV Box. It would fast charge the unit, provide active cooling, shut down the iGPU, allow the CPU to ramp up to 4.0GHz, and have an internal slot for a dGPU. Here I’m recommending the AMD RX-480 (8GB) as the Base Model, and the RX-64Vega (16GB) as the top model. At least as the first options, as the technology evolves (eg Zen2 next with 6-core and 8-core options, and RX5600 and RX5700XT for next model). The connection could be through a PCIE connector. Or maybe proprietary. We know that Apple and Intel were having a strangle hold on the TB3 and TB4 protocol, and the USB 3.3 standard and lower is a joke, with the USB4 not coming for many many years. But it could have been done. And easily too. They just needed the vision, the effort, and just to do it. And stuff the brick and mortar companies, they can sell all the units from online for a couple years until their product gains enough traction.
Such an innovative and visionary move by a collaboration from AMD+ASUS, it would send the big corporations into a mad panick attack, as Intel gets flustered, the other ODMs (Dell, HP, etc) get jealous, with Microsoft getting pressured, and the retail stores deciding to not get as greedy. Eventually the industry would have to shift, just like it has done whenever a disruptor enters the market, be it the Tesla Model S, iPhone 3G, or Ring Doorbell.
Great analysis — I had similar ideas back in 2015/16 when eGPUs were becoming more mainstream due to TB3. In my ideas, the handheld was a phone running a version of Windows mobile, though.
PS: Sorry for the rant, and huge wall of text.
Your idea is even better.
I thought of something similar but that would be pretty ambitious for that kind of product. Difficult but definitely not impossible.
We sort of dabbled with the Motorola Atrix in 2011. But it was kind of clunky and underpowered. Definitely a victim of being ahead of its time. The next years, we also Lenovo have a crack at it. They had a couple x86 Phones, powered by Intel Atom. But they also had the Transformer Tablets. And the most ambitious one was the Phone that can connect to the back of a tablet, which can connect to the back of a laptop. Yeah it was more of a miss than a hit. The mainstream players of Apple and Google never tried, but Samsung… We have the Samsung DeX but that is definitely NOT great, it is pretty meh today despite the powerful hardware.
Microsoft was actually pretty close back in 2016. They had the HP Elite X3 phone, with the powerful QSD 820 chipset, and it ran Windows10 Mobile. This wasn’t just a competent Mobile Operating System that was actually competitive against the likes of iOS 9 and Android 6, but it also had one extra feature. Continuum was a mode that when the supported phone was docked, it would revert into the full Desktop PC operating system. Yes, full Windows right there in your pocket. The only catch was that it ran full programs, but not the legacy executables. Windows10 Mobile was basically what Microsoft SHOULD have released back in 2009. Instead they released Windows Phone 7 that was utter garbage back in 2011, just after their failed Microsoft Kin devices in 2010.
But someone else who was REALLY close was actually Razer. In 2019 they released the Razer Phone 2, which was a large but pocketable phone. But it could also switch into a handheld gaming console just by sliding on two-half controllers on its sides (JungleCat). And to make things even more interesting they also had Project Linda, where you would have a Razer Blade laptop. But the phone would slot into the area where the touchpad would live. So the phone would become the storage and processing unit for the laptop, with its screen becoming a precision touchpad, and it’s front-firing loudspeaker as the laptop’s speakers. It also had extra ports for laptopy things, a big screen, and a comfortable keyboard. Also had a sizeable battery to keep the display powered whilst also charging up your phone. Neato. But Razer pulled the plug and pulled out.
Imagine that instead of the 2019 Razer Phone 2, we substituted it for the 2016 ZTE Axon 7, and we kept everything else the same, but instead of the Android-DeskMode we had the full-fat Windows10 operating system on there with Continuum.
It could’ve happened. And it would have been one way to convert Apple users to other platforms. But Microsoft was too incompetent and too late to the mobile market, and Android whilst fast and innovative has some drawbacks.
We as consumers definitely missed many opportunities to have a more expansive computing experience. In an alternate universe, we would’ve had some proper x86 Windows Handhelds, Tablets, and Ultrabooks that Docked into an External Box as early as 2015. And in 2020 we would’ve had a competitor to that from ARM-phones entering into the docking scene. But alas, we are in a much darker timeline.
Okay, occulink actually was a dead end all along.
With over 15L volume, its basically average size mini-ITX case, but without mainboard mount.
Can’t see a turbo button (hi/low power) or any dongle/hub io’s. Other than that kudos to Lenovo.