Weird idea for gpus

[ThatBlockishWay]

So Ive got a weird idea for how gpus +could+ be. Imagine if the gpu was just a smaller mobo with a pci-e connector at the bottom, 'okay nothing too weird yet'..., only everything is hotswappable. The gpu chip itself sockets in like the cpu on the mainboard. I dont know too much about cpu interfacing with the mem, the most I know is the extent of buildzoid's video so I dont know if this would make a difference, but it seems like the main ram issue is bandwidth. But what if it was designed to have more pins and stuff dedicated to interfacing with the ram and it was in quad channel. Which brings me to the ram, what if the ram was hotswappable too? lt just used rego sodimm or something and there were four or eight sockets in quad channel. I guess a different route would be having tiers of models with varying amounts of vram, like one board is socket x with 512mb of ram soldered on, the next is socket x 1gb soldered on, etc.

I know this isn't realistic and prob not how it works in anyway but its a neat thought no?

[TH3R34P3R]

i mean, it would be amazing, as people could come in low end, and just go for  higher end chip without having to render their original investment completely useless. it would however run into problems where the die sizes are SO much larger in the mega GPUs compared to the low end GPUs. 

 

interesting concept - totally. 

would i like this - yes. 

is it practical - sadly no. 

[Syntaxvgm]

this would be a massive problem on the software side. 

[Fasauceome]

The way you'd need to solve the ram problem is to have a set amount soldered on, because quad channel DDR4 does not come close to the bandwidth needed for graphics. The hot swappable GPU is realistic, but ultimately impractical because of cooling and power draw requirements shifting so much.

[SkyHound0202]

https://www.pcgamer.com/amd-radeon-pro-ssg-pairs-vega-with-2tb-of-memory/

Quote

That would be the Radeon Pro SSG. Built for serious content creation, the Radeon Pro SSG pairs 16GB of HBM2 ECC memory with 2TB of NAND flash storage plugged into a pair of M.2 ports for extended memory support. So basically it supports having a pair of NVMe SSDs onboard.

 

[Billy Pilgrim]

31 minutes ago, ThatBlockishWay said:

So Ive got a weird idea for how gpus +could+ be. Imagine if the gpu was just a smaller mobo with a pci-e connector at the bottom, 'okay nothing too weird yet'..., only everything is hotswappable. The gpu chip itself sockets in like the cpu on the mainboard. I dont know too much about cpu interfacing with the mem, the most I know is the extent of buildzoid's video so I dont know if this would make a difference, but it seems like the main ram issue is bandwidth. But what if it was designed to have more pins and stuff dedicated to interfacing with the ram and it was in quad channel. Which brings me to the ram, what if the ram was hotswappable too? lt just used rego sodimm or something and there were four or eight sockets in quad channel. I guess a different route would be having tiers of models with varying amounts of vram, like one board is socket x with 512mb of ram soldered on, the next is socket x 1gb soldered on, etc.

I know this isn't realistic and prob not how it works in anyway but its a neat thought no?

This sounds great, however, it would just make everything more expensive. Remember the Dram shortage and crypto bubble GPU prices? Now imagine them combined.

[ThatBlockishWay]

34 minutes ago, Syntaxvgm said:

this would be a massive problem on the software side. 

I hadn't even thought about that