Cables, docks and a chassis the size of a desktop computer. That is the cost you have to pay for eGPU. WiCi is trying to eliminate all of that. WiCi One, from WiCi Technologies, encloses a desktop NVIDIA RTX graphics card and communicates with your laptop, tablet or smartphone via Wi-Fi 7 without any cable connection. Your applications continue to run on your device while the graphics alone gets transferred. It sounds unbelievable but the numbers stand proof of that. The independent tests are still in progress. This is what the WiCi One does and how it works.
Also read: AI bubble crack: Why major tech companies are under crazy pressure
The WiCi One comes with either an RTX 5060 Ti with 16GB or an RTX 5090 with 32GB. It also has its own CPU, NVMe drive and a Wi-Fi 7 wireless antenna. You can consider it as a graphics card that is not installed in your PC but resides in a drawer and provides performance to all devices in your house. In addition, it has WiCi’s software called InferSSD that allows AI model weights streaming to make massive language models possible in small hardware.
The maximum speed of Wi-Fi 7 is expected to be 11.5 Gbps. OCuLink achieves up to 64 Gbps speed, while Thunderbolt 5 offers 80 Gbps speeds. PCIe will perform poorly if used in the air space. WiCi virtualized graphics card driver recognizes the box as a local card and reduces communication. The driver stores reusable data near the GPU and sends the commands in a batch. The company claims that network latency can be reduced 10 times. Your application never recognizes the location of the GPU.
Also read: Deepinder Goyal’s Temple is up for pre-order at Rs 85,000, but what are you actually buying?
Neither of those apply. Cloud gaming is when the game plays on some other computer and the stream of video is sent to you. In this case, the game is playing on your laptop. Only the GPU instructions and rendered frames travel over the network.
WiCi’s internal benchmarks use unedited tests with DLSS 4 on 4K resolution via Wi-Fi 7. For Cyberpunk 2077, there are 80fps on 5060 Ti and 110fps on 5090. Black Myth: Wukong reaches 60fps and 90fps. These are impressive results. But they are the manufacturer’s claims. There is no other party who can provide frame time charts or 1% lows. Average fps does not tell anything about stutter.
According to WiCi, the base round-trip time is 1.5ms. Typically, the latency of Wi-Fi 7 remains below 10ms, but a single dropped packet or an overcrowded 6 GHz channel might lead to a delay. WiCi admits, according to Gizmodo, that gaming would probably not be the best application for the technology, which is why WiCi includes the Thunderbolt 4 port for wired use. Esporters had better look for something else. Single gamers with a slim notebook might consider it.
Driver mode is supported by macOS, Windows, and Linux laptop devices, and applications can be executed directly. In case of mobile phones or tablets running on either iOS or Android, connectivity happens via the WiCi SDK or the OpenAI-compatible API, hence applications and not games. Wi-Fi 7 is required on the client device to achieve the stated performance figures. The box is plugged into an electrical outlet like a router.
The 5060 Ti edition starts at $2,599 and the 5090 edition costs $9,999. Orders ship in about eight weeks, to US addresses only for now. Buyers in India cannot order it yet.
Also read: Top smart locks with Face ID you can buy for your home