191–200 of 362 posts
The thing I don't get is why are we so damn stuck on towers as the default form factor? It's pretty much masochism to mount a sensitive piece of 8 billon layer circuit board vertically and then hang a bunch of blocks of solid heat conducting metal to it from the side, held on only by a soldered on piece of plastic. Bring back proper desktop cases!
I think this problem will resolve itself. Nvidia pulled out all of the stops with the 4090 because they thought (hoped) they were going to be able to sell it in an insatiable market that was begging for the biggest most powerful die possible, mostly because of mining. Gamers have no appetite for such a monstrosity (the gpu equivalent to national lampoon’s family truckster), and there aren’t really any games on the ho…
but with things like stable-diffusion, such a card might have other uses other than games. For example, live paint-ins for photoshop, and other tidbits that are currently not realistically possible for the consumer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The GPU should be the motherboard, and everything sticks onto it.
So how would multi-GPU setups work?
Multi-gpu setups for computation could have two SKUs one "motherboard" SKU and one connectorized SKU with the connector NOT being PCIe (after a transition).
They already do multi-form-factor, PCIe and OAM for AMD, PCIe and SXM for Nvidia.
Just drop PCIe, have a large motherboard SKU with a CPU slot and some OAM/SXM connectors in quantities up to what a wall socket can supply in terms of wattage (so, like 1 or 2 lol).
Vestigial PCIe cards can hang off the CPU card, if they're even needed.
High speed networking and storage is already moving to the DPU so these big GPUs, unhindered by the PCIe form-factor, could just integrate some DPU cores like they do RT cores, and integrate high speed networking and storage controllers into the GPU.
Home user? You get 1 or 2 DPU cores for NVMe and 10-gig Ethernet. Datacenter? 64 DPU cores for 100-gig and storage acceleration. Easy-peasy.
It's the IBM PC legacy. The won and we've lived with that form-factor now for 40 years. A new PC looks very much like that of 1982. Back in '82 when I started in robotics tech, we mostly used VME. A super-robust interconnect platform. There is no "motherboard" with VME and similar bus architectures. There is a backplane. Why can't we have the benefits of a physical platform like VME but with the electrical form-facto…
An important reason why you cannot have that is that the VME is a shared bus, while PCIe is a very high-frequency LVDS point-to-point system that you absolutely cannot implement on a shared bus.
Think of it like VMEexpress.
I use PCIe over VPX every day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPX
Please, lord, somebody else outside of aerospace use it so more vendors get involved and availability and basically everything about the entire supply chain gets better through competition.
I'm surprised this isn't mentioned here more clearly: Some high end cases like the be quiet silent base I'm using have the option to mount the graphics card vertically, basically parallel to the mainboard, in a separate anchor slot. It needs an additional connector cable (~$20), but other than that is easy to setup, looks better with a look-in case (the illuminated fans face the glass side) and the weight pulls on a…
The thing I don't get is why are we so damn stuck on towers as the default form factor? It's pretty much masochism to mount a sensitive piece of 8 billon layer circuit board vertically and then hang a bunch of blocks of solid heat conducting metal to it from the side, held on only by a soldered on piece of plastic. Bring back proper desktop cases!
Right? Floor space is at an all-time premium with high housing costs. And most people I know have a stack of books/etc. to rise the monitor anyway.
This is not a new problem, back in the late 80s I worked for a Mac graphics card developer ... We made some of the first 24bit accelerated graphics cards. Our first was just an existing card with a small daughter card with pals an sram on it, it was so easy that we got our own logos put on many of the chips to put the competition off the scent, we designed that one in days and got it to market in weeks. We immediatel…
I'm surprised this isn't mentioned here more clearly: Some high end cases like the be quiet silent base I'm using have the option to mount the graphics card vertically, basically parallel to the mainboard, in a separate anchor slot. It needs an additional connector cable (~$20), but other than that is easy to setup, looks better with a look-in case (the illuminated fans face the glass side) and the weight pulls on a…
https://www.kitguru.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/2-Still-8...
Every time I see the sizes of GPUs increase, I'm reminded of this from over 2 decades ago: https://vgamuseum.ru/wp-content/gallery/bitching-fast/bitchi...
