Village Instruments to develop external Thunderbolt graphics card
Do you want the sleek, aluminum goodness of a new MacBook Air with awe-inspiring graphics performance? Then you're in luck, because Village Instruments is starting development of a Thunderbolt-based version of their ViDock, an external graphics card enclosure.
The CEO of Village Instruments, Hubert Chen, put a post on Facebook last week to see how many customers would potentially be interested in such a product. In the post, Chen noted that the company would begin production if 50 people responded positively about the ViDock. As of today, there are well over 350 comments, so Chen gave the project a go-ahead.
The existing ViDock uses an ExpressCard interface to connect to a PCI Express graphics card enclosure. Thunderbolt provides about 4 times the amount of bandwidth as ExpressCard and performance should be excellent as a result.
There's no word on when the new product will be out of the labs and available for sale, nor did Village Instruments provide a hint on pricing. The existing ViDock line ranges from US$199 to $279 depending on the model selected -- power requirements for the graphics cards are the differentiating factor.
