Discuss: How much longer will the MXM 3.0b standard be around?

With all of the MXM standards now, I wonder how much longer the 3.0b standard will last. Will we have a new one next year? Or will the current standard support the next wave of GPUs? With the new mobile GPUs supporting PCI Express 3.0 I hope the current standard will be around for another couple of years so I can upgrade my gpu again in a year or two.


Let me know what you think!

 

These days there are very few laptops that use MXM connectors. With the size of laptops shrinking and a greater focus on thin and light, I imagine more and more will have GPUs that are permanently affixed to the motherboard. Perhaps we may even see big strides for the integrated graphics for Haswell and Broadwell CPUs (HD5000 and HD6000).

 

since power requirements are getting lower and lower i would see no need for a new mxm type, unless we saturate the current pci express slot, which i dont think we are even close to doing yet. I bet next gen gpu's will be 3.0b considering rumor has them at 'only" around 20% faster anyways. no one can know for sure

I hope your wrong moviemarketing, im a hard core system builder and I dont want to see this happen, everything integrated is going back to square 1! lol

 

I'd say they'll stay in the niches where they are now: higher end gaming laptops and mobile workstations. Since those are offered with multiple GPU options, it makes sense to have a separate PCB for the GPU instead of having multiple motherboards.

On the mainstream side of things, laptops are bound to get thinner so soldered will stay the norm.

 

Doesn't look like we're reaching a current limit and 3.0b already does PCI-E 3.0; so I don't see a reason to change it.

 

MXM was already updated to 3.1 a while ago:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/650077-mxm-standard-3-1-new-one-up-3-0-a.html

 

Yes, but the 3.1 standard will still be backward compatible with the 3.0b standard correct?

 

Yes!

 

Is MXM 3.0b going to be phased out? Nope. Is it a dying breed? Yup. Acer and ASUS dropped out ages ago, all that's left is MSI Gaming series, Alienware, Clevo, and high end mobile workstations like 8760W/M6700/M4700. Heck even W series Lenovo has went to soldered GPU's. Sad to see it dying, I bought an MSI barebones for 299 with an MXM 3.0A GPU, just add CPU, RAM, HDD and WLAN and you are good to go.

 

It will be quite a while before MXM goes away. They may be a niche, but they're still a very strong niche. I'm sure it makes financial sense for a manufacturer to offer multiple MXM cards than multiple motherboards with various soldered GPU's. This is probably most important with smaller size vendors too, because they won't have as much excess inventory of motherboards at the end of a product cycle. They only have to manage one, maybe two motherboards (depending on features) and offer as many GPU's as they see fit. It's same thing for socketed CPU's. If you embed then you're stuck with a large inventory of motherboards with various combinations of CPU's, GPU's, among other things.

 

I might add that the Dell Precision mobile workstation M6X00 and M4X00 series also make use of MXM 3.0b cards.
Also the new Lenovo Ideapad Y500 gaming notebook can be upgraded with aditional discrete GPU for SLI through the Ultrabay, and i believe this expansion card has also some kind of MXM module integrated.

 

See no reason to change it. Seems to me the MXM changes were mostly about TDP and right now, TDP is going down on the high end machines and bulky gaming machines are slowly going out the door. They will be getting slimmer and more power efficient soon. Already the P150EM from Clevo packs more power and performance than I could have imagined 3 years ago in such a small machine. It's amazing, and it's only going to get better. I think the big limitation now is just the fans and cooling/heatsinks. Once that is revolutionized, we'll see thinner and better machines. That's the next jump in laptop gaming I think. MBP/Razer is not it, those have terrible cooling, cook your eggs and burn your balls off, no thanks.

 

They may kill off 3.0a, I think we can count the number of new machine that offer 3.0a on 1 hand.

 

We wont see it go for a while on the high end due to the expense of routing high bit high clock gddr5 traces into your motherboard adding entire layers you would not need otherwise.