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Handheld gaming PC maker GPD has two new devices on the way, and neither are handhelds. One is a mini PC and the other is a GPU dock. What they have in common is that they’re some of the first consumer-focused devices with an MCIO 8i connector with support for PCIe 5.0 x8 connections using an external cable.
With support for data transfer speeds up to 256 Gbps, that means the new GPD BOX mini PC and GPD G2 graphics dock should theoretically be able to communicate up to four times faster than a mini PC and eGPU that use a 4-lane OCuLink adapter… although that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll see four times the graphics performance.
In reality, what this will hopefully do is offer users the ability to use a desktop graphics card with a mini PC without taking the kind of performance hit that you’d normally see from using an external graphics dock rather than a built-in PCIe slot.
GPD hasn’t announced pricing or availability details for its upcoming products yet, but the company has shared a few images showing off its upcoming products and some key specs.
The G PD BOX is expected to be a mini PC with an Intel Panther Lake processor, up to 64GB of LPDDR5x-8533 memory, two M.2 slots (one PCIe 5.0 x4 and one PCIe 4.0 x2), dual 2.5 GbE LAN ports, two USB4 v2 ports with support for speeds up to 80 Gbps (which GPD describes as 160 Gbps bidirectional bandwidth, which is kind of true if you add the uplink and downlink speeds, but you won’t ever see 160 Gbps if you’re measuring just one direction).
GPD will actually offer two different models of this mini PC. One has an Intel Core Ultra 7 356H processor with 4-core Intel integrated graphics and an MCIO 8i port for a high-speed connection to the GPD G2 graphics dock. The other has an Intel Core Ultra X7 358H processor with higher-performance 12-core Intel Arc B390 integrated graphics… but no MCIO connector.
The GPD G2, meanwhile, is a graphics dock with a physical PCIe x16 connector (limited to 8 lanes) for a GPU, an M.2 2280 slot for an optional PCIe 3.0 x2 SSD, an integrated fan and 800W power supply, and support for MCIO and USB4 v2 connections, as well as a Gigabit Ethernet port and a few USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports. GPD says if you add an NVIDIA RTX 4090 graphics card with the dock, it should perform only about 2% slower when using an MCIO 8i connection than it would if inserted directly into a PCIe x8 slot in a desktop computer.
The graphics dock measures 157.3 x 119.8 x 182mm (6.2″ x 4.7″ x 7.2″) and has an aluminum-magnesium alloy body.
The GPD BOX isn’t the first mini PC to support PCIe 5.0 x8 connections. The latest Khadas Mind devices use a proprietary interface to offer the same function… but only with devices that use that Khadas Mind Link interface. And the Beelink GTi15 Ultra and Beelink EX Pro graphics dock also support a PCIe 5.0 connection, but they’re only compatible with each other.
What makes GPD’s solution different is that the company is using MCIO 8i (Mini Cool Edge IO) connectors and cables. This is a standard that’s been used for servers for a while, but which hasn’t been common in consumer devices. The same was true for OCuLink, until Chinese mini PC and handheld gaming PC makers started using it a few years ago. It’s too soon to tell whether GPD is ahead of the curve here, or just trying something new. This being GPD though, I wouldn’t be surprised to see MCIO 8i p orts in upcoming handhelds and other devices.
via gpd_devices Discord
Either way, for now the GPD BOX and GPD G2 will effectively be compatible mostly with each other when they arrive, simply because there aren’t a lot of consumer devices that use MCIO 8i. But since MCIO 8i is a standard that’s already used in servers, you could theoretically use the GPD G2 graphics dock with something other than the GPD BOX mini PC, and vice versa.
The GPD G2 graphics dock also isn’t limited to only using MCIO 8i connections. It also has a USB4 v2 port (which, as I mentioned, supports up to 80 Gbps data transfer speeds… but you won’t get to utilize all of that speed for the GPU, since USB4 v2 is limited to PCIe 4.0 x4).
via /r/gpdwin, VideoCardz, and The Phawx (YouTube)
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