Friday, October 11th 2024
NVIDIA Might Consider Major Design Shift for Future 300 GPU Series
NVIDIA is reportedly considering a significant design change for its GPU products, shifting from the current on-board solution to an independent GPU socket design following the GB200 shipment in Q4, according to reports from MoneyDJ and the Economic Daily News quoted by TrendForce. This move is not new in the industry, AMD has already introduced socket design in 2023 with their MI300A series via Supermicro dedicated servers. The B300 series, expected to become NVIDIA's mainstream product in the second half of 2025, is rumored to be the main beneficiary of this design change that could improve yield rates, though it may come with some performance trade-offs.
According to the Economic Daily News, the socket design will simplify after-sales service and server board maintenance, allowing users to replace or upgrade the GPUs quickly. The report also pointed out that based on the slot design, boards will contain up to four NVIDIA GPUs and a CPU, with each GPU having its dedicated slot. This will bring benefits for Taiwanese manufacturers like Foxconn and LOTES, who will supply different components and connectors. The move seems logical since with the current on-board design, once a GPU becomes faulty, the entire motherboard needs to be replaced, leading to significant downtime and high operational and maintenance costs.
Sources:
MoneyDJ, Economic Daily News, TrendForce
According to the Economic Daily News, the socket design will simplify after-sales service and server board maintenance, allowing users to replace or upgrade the GPUs quickly. The report also pointed out that based on the slot design, boards will contain up to four NVIDIA GPUs and a CPU, with each GPU having its dedicated slot. This will bring benefits for Taiwanese manufacturers like Foxconn and LOTES, who will supply different components and connectors. The move seems logical since with the current on-board design, once a GPU becomes faulty, the entire motherboard needs to be replaced, leading to significant downtime and high operational and maintenance costs.
14 Comments on NVIDIA Might Consider Major Design Shift for Future 300 GPU Series
Seriously? Why the hell hasn't GPU sockets been a thing? VDIMM modules? It's not like it would all that difficult..
VRM difference. Traces difference on the board for different memory buses and configs (and PCI-e lanes nowadays). Different sized chips requiring different cold plates on coolers since there is no unified IHS. Lots of reasons, really. They are POTENTIALLY solvable, but you would have to have a board and cooler combo that would be interchangeable between a hypothetical 4060 and 4090. This would be hilariously costly. Do we really want GPUs coating even more?
Cost is hard to gauge as you could have two 600W PSU's (one for CPU daughter board and one for GPU daughter board) which can be cheaper than one 1.2 kW power supply. The ability to upgrade just the VRAM and GPU itself could generate cost savings over time.
Either way, we are stuck in the socketed CPU, DIMM slot, multiple PCIe slots off of one motherboard era as it has been since the 80386 days (circa late 80s). Only the integration of I/O to the motherboard has really changed from those days requiring less expansion slots. Oh and I'm glad the era of jumpers is over. I hated those little plastic pieces of you know what. :)
Because it doesn’t work this way even with CPUs? Good luck cooling a 14900KS with a stock cooler. Same here - if you have a hypothetical 600W 5090 and standardize with THAT in mind you’d have to make it so that “any cooler” can reasonably keep THAT cool. Which is costly. I suppose the argument can be made for establishing a ceiling for power usage on GPUs and going from there, but it wouldn’t fly.
Essentially, socketed GPUs, be it for AIBs or directly onto MoBos, would require a complete overhaul of everything about the modern PC form-factor, as @Daven has mentioned. And it’s just not really feasible as it stands right now - ATX and its offspring has a profoundly ingrained effect on how every single PC part is created and functions. And it has been this way for decades now. Shifting the entire ecosystem just for some potential upgradeability benefits wouldn’t fly with any of the current players.
The same should apply to GPUs.
I mean, sure, in that you can theoretically put the 14900K into the shittiest board possible and slap an Intel stock cooler on top of it. You won’t be able to actually access the full potential of the chip, but I suppose by the metric of “it can be physically done” it works.
You also haven’t provided any actual argument other than “it should be like this just cause” which… okay. I will be sure to forward your feedback to whoever it may concern.
90's had their own chip(s) with each and every function. Dozens of examples, 3DFX for example. Chips and tech got advanced, now pretty much house everything inside of it, but Nvidia's approach right now is extremely inefficient. High failure rates on wafers is expensive. AMD on the other hand now makes the compute dies seperate from the memory cache dies - yielding much better on wafers and thus get more out of it.