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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

#321

Post by im_down_w_otp »

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 have a SuperMac Thunder/24 w/ DSP upgrade currently in a Quadra 840AV in my little home office museum here. I even have the original boxes, software, etc. :-)

I'm a fan of your work! I'd love to chat sometime.

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

#322

Post by hyperdimension »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #298
wongarsu wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I see. A very good point. Thank you. This reminds me about the explanation of why do USB-C docks have separate USB-2 ports: because every USB-3 lane has a separate USB-2 sub-lane and these are left vacant after using USB-3 lanes to connect an SD card reader and a NIC internally. By the way, about brave horizontal desktop PC designs, note a neighbor comment by c0balt mentions one, to it seems very nice, I would buy on…

Funnily enough, I happen to sell these horizontal ATX cases door-to-door! Only thing is, I'm a bit far from your area, and I can't stand travelling more than I need to. You'd help me a ton by helping me schedule my way to you, if you've got a few minutes.

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

#323

Post by naasking »

tpmx wrote: post #196
ironmagma wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having a ~140 mm tall desktop case under the monitor doesn't work that well with today's pretty large monitors - it would result in uncomfortable viewing angles. Add to that the often very wide monitor stands. And increased cooling noise because the case comes closer to your ears.

Mount the computer on the back of the screen.

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

#324

Post by eropple »

mtsr wrote: post #226
danielheath wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PCI latency has no impact on rendering, but your card/motherboard may fallback to PCIE3 instead of using PCIE4, in which case filling the cards entire VRAM from RAM could take an extra half-second (slowing the loading of new textures an infinitesimal amount).

Modern engines also do a lot of streaming data to VRAM, rather than loading everything up front. So it’s not necessarily a single delay and could very well impact framerates etc.

Is there anything out now, or even on horizon, that's materially impacted at running at PCIe 3.0 rather than PCIe 4.0 rates? I can't think of much.

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

#325

Post by imtringued »

jvanderbot wrote: post #44
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.

You can easily buy a NUC ECE (size of a graphics card) and use a pcie cable to connect to an actual card. This is my plan for my next machine.

Ok so just plug your computer into the GPU ;)

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

#326

Post by imtringued »

rocket_surgeron wrote: post #193
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #94

Earlier 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…

Honestly just use chiplets technology for more cores and get rid of the multi GPU concept entirely.

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

#327

Post by dylan604 »

rwmj wrote: post #260
smilespray wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I was going to guess TARGA, but maybe those cards were PC only?

I remember back then searching ebay for a used Targa, but being confused by why all of the result thumbnails were Porsches.

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

#328

Post by dylan604 »

wongarsu wrote: post #284
qwerty456127 wrote: post #271

Back 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…

> Somewhat fits in the rising popularity of putting your tower on your desk.

I would never want a PC on my desk again. The fan noise would be annoying as hell. Also, the form factor for modern multi-monitors would make them awkward to have sitting ontop of a box like that.

The modern designs are using silent systems like those from Apple with passive cooling, so you're not going to be using a GPU like those discussed here.

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

#329

Post by dylan604 »

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...

Hmm, multiple GPU chips on the same board? Could this be where did Nvidia came up with the idea?
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