The title is quite misleading ;)<p>There has been already a standard for about a decade and it's called PCI Express :)
I had an external GPU setup about 8 years ago using the ExpressCard slot which worked at 1.6Gbit/s at the time (about 1/4th of what PCIe(1) X16 offered, but still more than enough for even upper mid-range GPU's of the day).<p>Since ThunberBolt came out you could run external GPU's without any issues or even performance bottlenecks.<p>The PCIe(3.0) x4 on TB3 these days offers more bandwidth than PCIe(2.0) x16 does and it's more than enough to saturate any high end GPU on the market today or in the foreseeable future.<p>Intel with IRIS and other IGP's and MSFT through DX12 and WDDM improvements support pretty much GPU hotswap which make this a plug and play setup (historically if you wanted to use an external GPU you had to do a full system reboot to initiate it).<p>But this the main problem for AMD atm, Thunderbolt and pretty much the entire eco-system for external GPU's today is based on Intel techonlogy, AMD has yet to implement TB or managed to create a competitor to it and it has tried and failed twice already - LightingBolt which was later re-branded and redesigned as DockPort.<p>So if AMD want to support external GPU's all they need to do is bite the bullet and implement TB at the cost of their pride and some royalty fees, but as it seems now all they want to do is get some PR and then abandon the project complaining about market monopoly like they've done quite a few times in the past.<p>Shame what have became of AMD, I loved them in the Athlon x64 days, too bad they tried to play dirty early on and then got fixated on the same tech they had without capitalizing on their market success to push it forward, they thought they can play the same game as Intel and they failed, poorly.<p>AMD's playbook is leading them to a dead end, at this point i hope they'll spin off their GPU department into a separate company that might get back on the right path that ATI has been going towards (which oddly enough also hit a dead end because they were too "cool" to play ball after their meteoric rise during the R300 vs GeforeFX days).<p>But hey Ars seems to like rooting for the "underdog" even when it doesn't deserve it, but at least the amount of fanboyism in comment section made me laugh a bit.