Just replace the motherboard with a GPU board with cooling solution on the bottom, and CPU socket on top along with all other connectors. Make them in 2 standard heights so cases can be standardized. The boards will have NO slots since the board IS the video card. This is of course only slightly serious, I prefer to use AMD chips with integrated GPUs and SFF. But for those that care about GPU capability lets just change the priority of the components and build the PC on top of the graphics solution.
We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
311–320 of 362 posts
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
My proposal isn’t too different. Move the one ultra-fast PCIe slot to the top of the motherboard. It would be mounted so the GPU plugs in parallel to the motherboard, on the same plane, above the motherboard on a tower case. The few other PCIe slots that exist can stay at the bottom. Only downside is the case has to be taller. Not sure if that would be considered a problem or not. This doesn’t really help dual GPU se…
>This doesn’t really help dual GPU setups They are with the people who spend the most money on GPUs
Are they?
Seems with the last GPU generation most enthusiast websites recommend to go for a bigger card instead of going SLI.
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#314No post body was provided.
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#315How 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.
Isn't this what the thunderbolt enclosures with GPUs are trying to do?
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 gr…
my big discovery was that for the sorts of workloads that our customers were using 99% consisted of just 4 operations
Those are the same operations that most if not all of even the very cheapest "2D-only" integrated graphics are capable of, starting from the early 90s up to today.
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#317The gamers nexus video is worth a watch for entertainment. The marketing has been cranked up to 11. Graphics cards promising their buyers "absolute dark power". Honestly...
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#318The gamers nexus video is worth a watch for entertainment. The marketing has been cranked up to 11. Graphics cards promising their buyers "absolute dark power". Honestly...
I actually enjoy the hubris.
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#319Back 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 Inte…
My wife has a modern case with a horizontal motherboard: Thermaltake Core V21. It's not short enough to put a monitor on top of (because it uses a dual-layer design with a "basement" under the motherboard for the PSU and HDDs) rather than being wider, but it does at least solve the GPU leverage issue.
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
3 metres, not to mention it wasn't a single cable, but a bunch hooked up to each other. Though I believe that was PCIe 3, so 4 might be more picky.