Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity

erikmcclure.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 362 posts

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

#261

Post by voxadam »

mariuolo wrote: post #175
greggsy wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NUC Extreme line is basically that, which IMO is a really good form factor. Memory and nvme storage are dense enough to make anything larger obsolete for the practical needs of most users. Emphasis on ‘practical’, not strictly ‘affordable’. The only advantages of larger form factors are the ability to add cheaper storage, additional PCI-e cards, and aftermarket cosmetic changes such as lighting. IMO, each of thes…

> The NUC Extreme line is basically that, which IMO is a really good form factor. Missed that one. I still mourn BTX.

I wish a PC form factor like NLX[0] had become popular where the CPU and memory is on a board that's inserted into a backplane parallel to the add-in cards (similar to VME[1]). IIRC NLX was mostly intended for low-profile applications like corporate desktops and retail systems (point-of-sales) but it never caught on. I can see the edge connector and backplane potentially being an issue with old school parallel PCI (that's a lot of pins) but the serial nature of modern PCIe and the advent of PCIe switches would significantly reduce the number of signal lines.

[0] https://www.halolinux.us/hardware/images/2249_56_22.jpg

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMEbus

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

#262

Post by stormbrew »

techdragon wrote: post #225
stormbrew wrote: post #179

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!

And while we’re at it, let’s bring back rack mount chassis. The rack mount market is appalling at the moment. If you don’t want the volume sales model imported to your region, your stuck getting overpriced models shipped at overpriced rates all the way from the increasingly limited number of manufacturers in china/India/etc, many of which are slowly sliding into overpriced industrial only markets. I bought one at ful…

I had a similar experience trying to find shallow storage chassis that would fit in 2 or 3u. Seems like a no brainer to me to have just a rack mount array of 5.25 bays I can put hot swap cages in but nope.

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

#263

Post by tecleandor »

Hamuko wrote: post #245
tcmb wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm getting a Cloudflare error page on that link: 'The owner of this website does not allow hotlinking to that resource'

Huh, didn't realise it spits out that kind of an error. I guess Cloudflare whitelists your IP address if you visit it once since that links still works for me without visiting the original URL? Anyways, you can see the photo here: https://www.kitguru.net/components/leo-waldock/phanteks-evol...

Yep, it's probably the deep linking protection. It probably doesn't like the HN referer

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

#264

Post by trashtester »

bmitc wrote: post #254
dotancohen wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are there other consumer markets where high-performance is so accepted and common place? I don't know about today, but a generation of two ago it was street cars, some time before that horses. Anything measurable will be compared, and people want (more) performance.

But performance street cars feel much more niche than gaming rigs. It does feel that performance (or perceived performance) oriented things in the computer market do seem to bleed into the broader market more than other markets. It's an interesting phenomenon.

Even "normal" cars tend to come with a lot more hp than most people need most of the time (unless they live in Germany or somewhere else where you can actually go really fast if you want to). Cars with a 100-200hp engine would probably be almost as usable with half the power.

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

#265

Post by techdragon »

stormbrew wrote: post #262
techdragon wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And while we’re at it, let’s bring back rack mount chassis. The rack mount market is appalling at the moment. If you don’t want the volume sales model imported to your region, your stuck getting overpriced models shipped at overpriced rates all the way from the increasingly limited number of manufacturers in china/India/etc, many of which are slowly sliding into overpriced industrial only markets. I bought one at ful…

I had a similar experience trying to find shallow storage chassis that would fit in 2 or 3u. Seems like a no brainer to me to have just a rack mount array of 5.25 bays I can put hot swap cages in but nope.

Absolutely! It’s so bad that “custom” rack mounting is one of the reasons I got myself a drill press. Sheet and bar stock is trivial to order cut to simple dimensions for panels, corner bracing and making “rack ears”.

But it still comes back to the fact i shouldn’t need to make a mini metalworking shop in order to affordably mount hardware horizontally in my rack. Rack mount should be the ultimate in “big computer enclosure” but instead of cool things like having a 2/3/4U massive rack mount water cooling radiator with big quiet fans to silence everything in a computer, it’s getting harder and harder to buy any parts for a non-OEM computer that aren’t festooned in RGB and designed for transparent towers with all the structural issues highlighted in the original article.

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

#266

Post by bhedgeoser »

spartanatreyu wrote: post #62
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #36

How about we move to external only GPUs with huge connectors? If GPUs are half the size, power consumption and price of a PC now, they might as well be a separate device. As a bonus the rest of the motherboard & PCs actually get much smaller. A PC without any spinning disks could conceivably just be the size of a NUC by default, something you can travel with when you don't need the beefy GPU.

The most expensive part of GPU operation (power-wise) isn't computation, it's actually moving information around. Moving the GPU further away from the CPU and storage is going to lead to worse latency and power requirements. Over the next 10-15 years, we'll probably see CPU+GPU packages become mainstream instead of CPU (with basic integrated graphics) and a separate GPU.

I think what the OP is suggesting is that PCs should have external PCIE connectors for plugging in GPU modules.

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

#267

Post by staz »

Lramseyer wrote: post #89

> Should we have GPU VRAM slots alongside CPU RAM slots? Is that even possible? I chuckled a little at this because I used to wonder the same thing until I had to actually bring up a GDDR6 interface. Basically the reason GDDR6 is able to run so much faster is because we assume that everything is soldered down, and not socketed/slotted. Back when I worked for a GPU company, I occasionally had conversations with co-wor…

What if we plug the motherboard in the GPU instead

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

#268

Post by bhedgeoser »

chucklenorris wrote: post #77
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #36

How about we move to external only GPUs with huge connectors? If GPUs are half the size, power consumption and price of a PC now, they might as well be a separate device. As a bonus the rest of the motherboard & PCs actually get much smaller. A PC without any spinning disks could conceivably just be the size of a NUC by default, something you can travel with when you don't need the beefy GPU.

The problem with external gpus is that the pcie5x16 slot requires signal integrity chips every 5 inches or so [1]. Even for pcie4 it's bad, many people had blue screens or boot issues when using pcie3 only rated riser cables with a pcie4 video card, even though electrically they have the same connections. So, having a huge cable with x16 lanes of pcie5 on the back of the computer doesn't seem that feasible. Maybe fib…

I remember linuxtechtips using a meter long wire to connect a 3090 to a computer and it worked flawlessly.

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

#269

Post by sqrt_1 »

krasin wrote: post #212
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

The same Youtuber did a 4090 "review" for April fool day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0frNP0qzxQc

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

#270

Post by bhedgeoser »

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #78
bmicraft wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One should note that it will works way worse with higher pcie versions of today

Are you referring to pcie 4?

A meter of extension adds ~10ns of latency (speed of light).
Post reply on HN