Thunderbolt 3.0 GPU Docks Should Appear Within The Next Six Months

At last week’s Intel Developer Forum event in San Francisco, I happened to cross paths with a booth that had some Thunderbolt 3.0 docks on display. What really caught my attention was the fact that one of them had a graphics card installed, and all I could think was, “Here we go again.”

You see, we’ve been seeing these GPU docks for what seems like forever. It was either CES 2008 or 2009 when I first saw one, and at the time, I was promised that we’d see them on the market “soon”. If that happened, I sure didn’t notice. As the years passed, we saw more and more of these docks, yet not a single one seemed to take hold. Up to this point, I haven’t known a single person to own one of these docks, and as a result, I’ve felt like we’d just never see one ever go on sale and become big.

But now we have Thunderbolt 3.0, a protocol that offers a ton of bandwidth – enough to support a GPU and other peripherals on the side. The Intel rep I talked to promised me that we’d see GPU docks in sale within the next six months, and I guess I believe it to an extent. It’s a matter of demand, because the tech does work. For the most part.

The demo on display included an AMD Radeon R9 280, a fast enough GPU to deliver quality 1080p gaming on your laptop. I was told that AMD has been quite proactive in getting its implementation to work, whereas NVIDIA is a bit behind, but still actively working on things. This isn’t as simple as tossing a GPU into a dock and expecting it to work – it requires hotplugging capabilities to be perfect. While AMD is well on its way to accomplishing this, NVIDIA should (hopefully) accomplish the same before these docks hit the market.

It’s not just Intel that’s interested in seeing these docks hit retail; recently, I’ve been reached out to by different GPU vendors that have expressed interest as well. I think if such docks carried a premium of no more than $100 (over the GPU that’s included), they could be a hit. That’s a small premium to pay, I think, to dramatically enhance the gaming capabilities of a modest laptop. To some, including a friend of mine, a dock like this would effectively rule out the need to build an entire desktop PC. That’s going to be mighty tempting.

I just hope for once, this proves to be a solution that actually takes hold. While any big desktop gaming GPU is going to require a capable CPU in a notebook to work to its fullest, a good solution like this is long overdue.