ASUS has a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Card with an M.2 SSD Slot

[TheLostSwede]

ASUS Chinese GM—Tony Yu—has shown off a graphics card concept on Bilibili that has a rather unusual feature, a slot for an M.2 NVMe SSD. The card is based on NVIDIA's GeForce RT 4060 Ti GPU and although not all details are clear at this point in time, but ASUS is taking advantage of the unused PCIe lanes on the card, since the AD106 GPU only uses eight PCIe lanes, the PCIe connector on the card has space for a further eight lanes. In theory ASUS could have added a pair of SSDs, since there are a total of eight lanes available, but as this was just a proof of concept, they seemingly stuck with a single SSD.

It's unclear if ASUS relies on bifurcation or if the company has added some kind of bridge chip, but bifurcation makes more sense, as a bridge chip would add a lot more cost. The neat thing with the NVMe drive being on the GPU, is that it also connects to the heatsink of the graphics card, which means the cooling should be rather good. However, for this to work properly, the SSD would have to be mounted back to front compared to how it would be mounted on a motherboard. Based on the test results, the SSD runs at a cool 42 degrees C, even when the GPU is being stress tested. It's likely that this product will not make it to markets outside of China, if it's ever launched into retail.



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[ExcuseMeWtf]

Whatever would make those sell, right?

 

[Frick]

More of this please.

 

[LabRat 891]

More of this please.

^this. Current-gen motherboards are lacking on expansion slots.

I'm still not sure if the GPU 'takes in' the full x16, and bifurcates it internally, somehow.
Or, if there's basic PCIe packet-switching in the GPU? If this requires Bifurcation-support, expect a lot of negative feedback from users that didn't know their board didn't properly support the feature.

 

[Chaitanya]

Why not add 2 M.2 slots given this GPU only uses x8 interface. That can be really useful for SFF PC builds where PCI-e expansion is sparce at best.

^this. Current-gen motherboards are lacking on expansion slots.

I'm still not sure if the GPU 'takes in' the full x16, and bifurcates it internally, somehow.
Or, if there's basic PCIe packet-switching in the GPU? If this requires Bifurcation-support, expect a lot of negative feedback from users that didn't know their board didn't properly support the feature.

Given this comes from brand that has castration fetish for features and excpet for their top end boards none support bifurcation its going to be a headache for support list.

 

[InVasMani]

Nice I've wanted to see more of this stuff ever since that Radeon Pro card did this years ago that was VEGA based. It's a good concept to integrate M.2 storage or other connectivity if the PCIE lanes aren't be utilized anyway. It could be great with 10G, WIFI 7/BT, and TB4 as well. I like the idea of it. On lower utilized GPU's they could get away with using a x16 PCIE slot and link width and then populate the card with a bunch of these additional features. I'm still waiting on storage like CXL in the form of a M.2 device. It could probably make sense in this scenario as well with the GPU being able to access it directly on the card itself.

 

[Shou Miko]

It's interresting yes because than x8 cards could have 2xM.2. slots on the back to make it a full x16 card to not block airflow underneath or for smaller motherboards like micro-atx or itx boards you can still have extra m.2. storage.

 

[LabRat 891]

Why not add 2 M.2 slots given this GPU only uses x8 interface. That can be really useful for SFF PC builds where PCI-e expansion is sparce at best.

Agreed. I like the concept, and would welcome on-GPU PCIe switching. (could sneakily allow some neat non-sanctioned partner cards, too.)

Given this comes from brand that has castration fetish for features and except for their top end boards none support bifurcation its going to be a headache for support list.

Oh? How dare you!
Asus is just 'with the times'. I hear that Their high-end boards supposedly like to be a lil sadistic on the voltage, too.
Don't judge Asus for being into kink

Nice I've wanted to see more of this stuff ever since that Radeon Pro card did this years ago that was VEGA based. It's a good concept to integrate M.2 storage or other connectivity if the PCIE lanes aren't be utilized anyway. It could be great with 10G, WIFI 7/BT, and TB4 as well. I like the idea of it. On lower utilized GPU's they could get away with using a x16 PCIE slot and link width and then populate the card with a bunch of these additional features. I'm still waiting on storage like CXL in the form of a M.2 device. It could probably make sense in this scenario as well with the GPU being able to access it directly on the card itself.

Me too.
The Radeon Pro SSG
It was (and is) fairly unique for exposing the NVMe SSDs as extended-VRAM.
IIRC, it used an in-house (Xilinx?) FPGA; presumably, with PCIe Switch 'programming' and AMD's own integrations.

What you speak of is kinda the other side of the coin in my desire for M.2-adaptable x4-lane GPUs: I just want to be able to fully-utilize all the lanes available to me.

It's interresting yes because than x8 cards could have 2xM.2. slots on the back to make it a full x16 card to not block airflow underneath or for smaller motherboards like micro-atx or itx boards you can still have extra m.2. storage.

With DirectStorage promised to be a thing (supposedly) in the near-future, I could genuinely see this become more common. The overall shorter trace-lengths going to/from the Primary CPU-connected PCI-e x16, are also going to help reliability/speed for storage.

 

[Ferrum Master]

Why they didn't opt for 8+4+4?

Asus being full retards as usual. I call it a sloppy job.

Oh they actually have, but made one pain in the arse to remove...

 

[AusWolf]

Since the card is PCI-e x8, why not use the unused lanes for something else? Neat!

 

[Fourstaff]

Very interesting proof of concept. I wonder if there will be any degradation of performance from either part.

 

[InVasMani]

Agreed. I like the concept, and would welcome on-GPU PCIe switching. (could sneakily allow some neat non-sanctioned partner cards, too.)

Oh? How dare you!
Asus is just 'with the times'. I hear that Their high-end boards supposedly like to be a lil sadistic on the voltage, too.
Don't judge Asus for being into kink


Me too.
The Radeon Pro SSG
It was (and is) fairly unique for exposing the NVMe SSDs as extended-VRAM.
IIRC, it used an in-house (Xilinx?) FPGA; presumably, with PCIe Switch 'programming' and AMD's own integrations.

What you speak of is kinda the other side of the coin in my desire for M.2-adaptable x4-lane GPUs: I just want to be able to fully-utilize all the lanes available to me.



With DirectStorage promised to be a thing (supposedly) in the near-future, I could genuinely see this become more common. The overall shorter trace-lengths going to/from the Primary CPU-connected PCI-e x16, are also going to help reliability/speed for storage.

There is a M.2 VGA device and yeah I mentioned the idea of M.2 GPU's a good while back. I think they would be really handy. Honestly that would be a perfect market for Intel to capitalize on a bit. Intel has always done rather well with codec support. Being able to cheaply upgrade to newer streaming codecs would be great for a HTPC setup. I would think they could cut down and/or shrink down the ARC 380 for a purpose like that. A $50-$75 cut down ARC 380 that slides into a M.2 slot would be fairly appealing even if it were as much as half the performance. They also could potentially be used as add in AI accelerator slots.

 

[Dirt Chip]

Or, out an PCIE4 x8 slot to connect another 4060TI..

 

[john_]

From the X570 era I was saying that modern motherboards are in fact mATX designs that look like full ATX because of their size(the main reason I stayed with X470 on AM4). Those modern emply PCBs could also point in that idea. I was basically saying that, because they didn't offer to split the 16 lanes from the CPU to 2 different PCIe x16 slots (in a x8 + x8 configuration), something that was common function on $60 motherboards 10 years ago.

This idea from ASUS could probably offer a partially fix for this limitation, by offering a x8 + x4 configuration. That leaves us of course with 4 more lanes unused, so if this idea gets adopted from more models and graphics cards manufacturers, we might even see graphics cards with two M.2 slots on them.

 

[Jism]

Nice I've wanted to see more of this stuff ever since that Radeon Pro card did this years ago that was VEGA based. It's a good concept to integrate M.2 storage or other connectivity if the PCIE lanes aren't be utilized anyway. It could be great with 10G, WIFI 7/BT, and TB4 as well. I like the idea of it. On lower utilized GPU's they could get away with using a x16 PCIE slot and link width and then populate the card with a bunch of these additional features. I'm still waiting on storage like CXL in the form of a M.2 device. It could probably make sense in this scenario as well with the GPU being able to access it directly on the card itself.

But that was for something else, compared to above. The VEGA would be capable of "using" that storage.

 

[TheLostSwede]

^this. Current-gen motherboards are lacking on expansion slots.

I'm still not sure if the GPU 'takes in' the full x16, and bifurcates it internally, somehow.
Or, if there's basic PCIe packet-switching in the GPU? If this requires Bifurcation-support, expect a lot of negative feedback from users that didn't know their board didn't properly support the feature.

That's not how bifurcation works. It's the motherboard that's able to see more than one device per slot and allocates resources to each device (IRQ, DMA, etc). So a suitable motherboard would be required.

 

[Shihab]

the SSD runs at a cool 42 degrees C

While mounted on a major heat-generating component, and with the chips' airflow constricted? I call bs...

 

[TheLostSwede]

Why they didn't opt for 8+4+4?

Asus being full retards as usual. I call it a sloppy job.

Oh they actually have, but made one pain in the arse to remove...

It's only one slot, it's a hole in the PCB so it can touch the heatsink.

While mounted on a major heat-generating component, and with the chips' airflow constricted? I call bs...

Well, that's what the software is reporting...

There is a M.2 VGA device and yeah I mentioned the idea of M.2 GPU's a good while back. I think they would be really handy. Honestly that would be a perfect market for Intel to capitalize on a bit. Intel has always done rather well with codec support. Being able to cheaply upgrade to newer streaming codecs would be great for a HTPC setup. I would think they could cut down and/or shrink down the ARC 380 for a purpose like that. A $50-$75 cut down ARC 380 that slides into a M.2 slot would be fairly appealing even if it were as much as half the performance. They also could potentially be used as add in AI accelerator slots.

The Silicon Motion one? Hardly a GPU though, but I guess there's no technical limitation in terms of putting something a bit more powerful on an M.2 card, just space and thermal restraints, as well as the narrow bus width.

I presume you've seen the are already M.2 ML/AI accelerators, but they're not GPU based.

 

[progste]

kinda wacky, but also interesting in some ways, what if you could add a small SSD cache on cards for fastert texture swapping?

 

[Ferrum Master]

It's only one slot, it's a hole in the PCB so it can touch the heatsink.

So I stand corrected. ASUS are retards as usual. As the other 4 lines are simply wasted.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

But what if you could do something stupid like have a smaller SSD for hybrid GPU-Caching rather than having to travel back and forth through the sub system everytime it needs to grab data located in your system ram?

So your GPU could cache, while it caches and you cache yourself a chicken dinner.

 

[unwind-protect]

Does Asus themselves even have a consumer board that does bifurcation?

 

[Nostras]

Does Asus themselves even have a consumer board that does bifurcation?

The vast majority of their boards does with AM5 at least.
See here

[Motherboard] Compatibility of PCIE bifurcation between Hyper M.2 series Cards and Add-On Graphic Cards | Official Support | ASUS Global

I'm a bit unsure if x4+x4+x4+x4 means that GPU can only do x4 or if x4+x4 still allows for x8 or that it really must be x8+x8 or x8+x4+x4.
If it's the former many support it, if it's not, it's a lot harder to find a cheap(er) board.

I think it's a bit of a pointless product however. Pricing must be seriously higher which kind of defeats the purpose of the entire product.
If they're going to sell it it's probably going to be OEM only.

 

[TumbleGeorge]

This is where I ask if the SSD at the end of the GF PCB (to be away from the hot spots, GPU, GDDR chips and voltage regulator modules) is actually closer than if it was on the nearest M.2 slot? Additionally, the PCIe controllers are still in the south bridge and on the CPU silicone. Steering signals still go a long way?

 

[Assimilator]

This is a relatively innovative move from ASUS to take a PCIe-lane-gimped GPU and pair it with a PCIe-lane-gimped motherboard to make something that better utilises the available lanes.

Of course, now the CPU manufacturers will use it as an excuse to give us even fewer PCIe lanes. Used to be that dual x16 slots were the norm on mid-range boards, now you're lucky if you get a second x8 on a high-end one, and you have to pay through the nose for "prosumer" CPUs and boards to get that basic functionality.