Have you seen cases these days? They already account for this.
We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
281–290 of 362 posts
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#282This 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…
This might be a weird question, but do you have any rundowns of the architecture handy? I love Retrocomputing and it sounds like an awesome thing to look at.
Nothing in particular - VRAM was the core of all the cards thise days, the serial port shift register (inside the VRAM) fed muxes that in turn fed luts and out to the display.
The VRAM array was 2 sets of 96 bits wide - the accelerator was in part a 1:4 24:96 mux that drove the VRAM array - that's how the dumb frame buffer worked.
I'd spent a year before all this writing code to grab stats figure out where the mac graphics code spent it's time, initially we'd expected to optimise drawing vectors (ie lines - autocad was driving the parallel PC graphics market at the time) - my big discovery was that for the sorts of workloads that our customers were using 99% consisted of just 4 operations:
- solid fills (>90%) - patterned fills - copying within the FB (ie scrolling) - writing text (quite low by important for the DTP market)
I wrote the spec for the first 2 cards (to do the first 3 operations) and the went off to design the 3rd chip (modelled in C, turned into an inch thick spec describing the state machines and data paths and then passed to someone else to make gates)
I added a hack on top of the copy primitive to accelerate text hiliting.
So that accelerator chip also contained a state machine did 4 simple things as fast as it possibly could (solid fills used magic modes in the VRAMS, it could fill at 1.5Gbytes/sec - faster than the high end 3D hardware at the time)
In the end the text fill was useful, but not that much faster (it turned 1-bit font images into 24-bit pixels on the fly), all that cool hardware was pissed away by the way the underlying apps used the font rendering subsystem (page maker invalidated the font cache every line, quark did an N-squared thing, etc)
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
I vaguely recall Nvidia motherboards were junk in the late 2000's.
They made motherboard chipsets (nforce, iirc?), not motherboards, unless I missed something. I think by the late 2000’s, though, their discreet gpus on laptops were problematic because they got so hot they detached from the motherboards or fried themselves. In a lot of cases, these systems shipped with these gpus and intel processors with integrated igpus. This happened to a thinkpad t400 I had a while ago, the nvidi…
> I think by the late 2000’s, though, their discreet gpus on laptops were problematic because they got so hot they detached from the motherboards or fried themselves.
That was indeed around ~2008-2010 - the issue was not that the chips fried themselves or got too hot. The issue was the switch to lead-free solder [1]... thermal cycling led to the BGA balls cracking apart as the lead-free solder formulation could not keep up with the mechanical stress. It hit the entire NVIDIA lineup at the time, it was just orders of magnitude more apparent in laptops, as these typically underwent a lot more and a lot more rapid thermal cycles than desktop GPUs.
> Iirc this snafu was what soured relations between apple and nvidia.
There have been multiple issues [2]. The above-mentioned "bumpgate", patent fights regarding the iPhone, and then finally that Apple likes to do a lot of the driver and firmware development for their stuff themselves - without that deep, holistic understanding on everything Apple would stand no chance at having the kind of power efficiency and freedom from nasty bugs that they have compared to most of the Windows laptops.
[1] https://semiaccurate.com/2009/08/21/nvidia-finally-understan...
[2] https://www.pcbuildersclub.com/2019/01/zwischen-apple-und-nv...
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#284Back in the days when I was a kid tower PCs were comparably rare and most of the PCs used the horizontal desktop design which essentially is the same like a tower but put on its side. People would often put the monitor on top of it to save the desk space (see the Windows 95-2000 "my computer" icon). Isn't it time for that to return so we wouldn't need “GPU Support Sticks”? By the way, what actually dissatisfies me is…
> horizontal desktop design
That's be a pretty clever solution. I wonder if any case designers are brave enough to try to pitch that solution. Somewhat fits in the rising popularity of putting your tower on your desk.
> I don't understand why some extra slots have to raise the cost up 10 times
Part is market differentiation, but the other part is that you quickly run out of PCIe lanes to the CPU (especially with Intel, thanks to their market differentiation). If the mainboard manages to use no more PCIe lanes than the CPU supports, everything is simple. Once you add more or bigger PCIe slots, more M2 slots or more USB3 ports, the mainboard has to include a fairly expensive PCIe switch to turn few lanes into more.
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#285Back in the days when I was a kid tower PCs were comparably rare and most of the PCs used the horizontal desktop design which essentially is the same like a tower but put on its side. People would often put the monitor on top of it to save the desk space (see the Windows 95-2000 "my computer" icon). Isn't it time for that to return so we wouldn't need “GPU Support Sticks”? By the way, what actually dissatisfies me is…
Because they usually have to use a different more expensive chipset and a lot of stuff uses PCIE these days that didnt before, for example NVME SSDs now take PCIE slots that were free to be used for different stuff before. And in the desktop market, most people just dont need more than a pcie slot for their boot drive and their GPU. Add to that that PCIE 4 and 5 are more expensive and require more expensive boards.
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#286As a kid it felt so weird to me that SLR lenses could be so massive that you mount the camera to it rather than the other way around. This feels like that.
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#287Back in the days when I was a kid tower PCs were comparably rare and most of the PCs used the horizontal desktop design which essentially is the same like a tower but put on its side. People would often put the monitor on top of it to save the desk space (see the Windows 95-2000 "my computer" icon). Isn't it time for that to return so we wouldn't need “GPU Support Sticks”? By the way, what actually dissatisfies me is…
The problem with cases that are oriented horizontally is they're usually required to be in a slim form factor in comparison to "normal" ATX or even mini ATX cases. This poses a problem for providing adequate cooling and power delivery. In face of GPUs (NVIDIA/ AMD) becoming more power hungry/ heat producing this just doesn't work out for most people. There were some attempts in the past[0] however they don't appear to have gained mainstream adoption. On the other hand, systems with low power components could be accomdated in this form factor but they most likely wouldn't benefit much from it (or just employ a laptop with a dock).
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
So how would multi-GPU setups work?
Multi-gpu setups for gaming are dead. 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 t…
> what a wall socket can supply in terms of wattage (so, like 1 or 2 lol).
So, you expect GPUs to take 1500W of power, each? (230V @ 16A)
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#289Back in the days when I was a kid tower PCs were comparably rare and most of the PCs used the horizontal desktop design which essentially is the same like a tower but put on its side. People would often put the monitor on top of it to save the desk space (see the Windows 95-2000 "my computer" icon). Isn't it time for that to return so we wouldn't need “GPU Support Sticks”? By the way, what actually dissatisfies me is…
Horizontal form factor might solve the 'at rest' problem, but the moment you pick up the case to move it somewhere (even still while horizontal) the socket it going to be under load. We really need a solution that supports the card well enough that it's safe even in transit.
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#290I'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…
This is a helpful post because I have exactly that case and no idea what that slot was for!
It's a fantastic case.