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We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity

erikmcclure.com

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Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity

#211

Post by Taniwha »

smilespray wrote: post #197
Taniwha wrote: post #170

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 may well have used those cards for work! Radius, RasterOps or SuperMac?

SuperMac - the first one was the "SuperMac Spectrum/24 series III", I can't remember the name of the big FPGA thing

I built the accelerator on the last project (that 200 pin chip - look for a chip SQD-01 aka 'SQuiD') that was the basis of a whole family of subsequent cards (starting with the Thunder cards)

Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity

#212

Post by krasin »

userbinator wrote: post #134

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...

Here is a video review of the BitchingFast 3D 2000: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmCEXbspWuI

Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity

#213

Post by TomVDB »

spartanatreyu wrote: post #190
userbinator wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most expensive part of GPU operation (power-wise) isn't computation, it's actually moving information around I doubt that. Compare the GPU temperature (a good proxy for power consumption) when playing a game or doing GPGPU stuff vs playing a video (without GPU acceleration, so it's just acting as a framebuffer). The former involves far more computation, and gets the GPU much hotter.

No. There was an internal nvidia presentation from a few years ago that stated that moving data was the hard part. (I can't find the presentation any more, but if anyone can find it, please post it below.) Previously graphics cards were essentially designed with a single area of the card handling computation, and another area holding memory. Data would need to be moved from the memory, to the computation area, then b…

Moving around data is indeed a major issue for any throughout oriented device. But for a gaming GPU, PCIe BW has never been an issue in any of the benchmarks that I’ve seen. (Those benchmarks artificially reduce the number of PCIe lanes.)

In fact, the 4000 series still has PCIe 4.

Moving data around for a GPU is about feeding the shader cores by the memory system. PCIe is way too slow to make that happen. That’s why a GPU has gigabytes of local RAM.

Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity

#214

Post by TomVDB »

layer8 wrote: post #98
Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you referring to pcie 4?

The RTX 4000 series uses PCIe 5, and the article references PCIe 6.

I was wondering about that. According to Nvidia RTX 4090 product page, it still used PCIe 4.

Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity

#216

Post by neurostimulant »

serf wrote: post #165
userbinator wrote: post #134

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...

yeah, but most of the weight on the new cards is just heat management stuff like heat pipes fans and heat-blocks/sinks. That card is huge, but I bet it's a fair bit lighter than most of the gaming sector cards now.

> * ugly mutha heatshinks sold separately

Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity

#217

Post by altacc »

userbinator wrote: post #134

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...

It exists! I looked at that and was sure it was a spoof until I saw the video of it.

Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity

#219

Post by smilespray »

Taniwha wrote: post #211
smilespray wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may well have used those cards for work! Radius, RasterOps or SuperMac?

SuperMac - the first one was the "SuperMac Spectrum/24 series III", I can't remember the name of the big FPGA thing I built the accelerator on the last project (that 200 pin chip - look for a chip SQD-01 aka 'SQuiD') that was the basis of a whole family of subsequent cards (starting with the Thunder cards)

I loved those cards. My daily driver was a fully stacked IIfx with a SuperMac card. I remember telling my friends my display was more than a thousand pixels (1152 or something) wide.

Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity

#220

Post by hutzlibu »

l-lousy wrote: post #136
userbinator wrote: post #134

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...

The fact that even the “not to be sold in china” bit is so on point even today is kind of scary

Or it is relaxing to be reminded, that all those geopolitical tensions and struggles are basically nothing new, so should not be taken too seriously.
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