J
ust as New Yorkers fl ee to Florida to
escape the harsh winters, rumor has it
that today’s GPU might one day migrate
to a motherboard socket, or out of the
case entirely, to escape rising tempera-
tures and bulging cooling mechanisms.
Socketing a GPU onto a motherboard
and allocating space to it (and its cooler)
might help mitigate the thermal restraints
on videocards by freeing the GPU from
the narrow slot it exists in today. Sound
a little far-fetched? A socketed graphics
chip for the PC isn’t a new idea. Defunctgraphics company Rendition proposed a
standard socket interface for graphics on
the motherboard as far back as 1998.
Called Socket X, Rendition’s design
would have replaced the AGP interface,
but it never made it out of the labs as a
shipping product. Rumors of a socketed
GPU were rekindled late last year when
tech website Anandtech.com reported
that nVidia was secretly working on a fl ip-
chip GPU that would fi t into a socket on
the motherboard. nVidia offi cials declined
to comment on the report.
Analyst Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie
Research pooh-poohed the idea. “No
way,” said Peddie of a socketed GPU. The
problem, Peddie said, is the same one
that killed Socket X: bandwidth. Unless
RAM is included in the die or on the pack-
age, main system memory is far too slow
to support today’s and tomorrow’s GPUs.
Peddie does foresee desktop vendors
adopting notebook graphics modules.
Notebooks seem primed to supplant
desktops as the standard PC, so note-
book add-in boards should become quite
common—and probably cheaper and eas-
ier to come by than PCI-E cards. But even
then, Peddie doesn’t see graphics for
enthusiasts moving to modules or sock-ets, because of performance constraints
associated with the smaller designs.
Raja Koduri, director of advanced
technology development at ATI, agreed
that a module or socket system is easy
to do and will likely be used for special
formfactors, but he doesn’t see it as a
solution that will satisfy enthusiasts in the
foreseeable future. Still, power and heat
problems aren’t going away.
“Max performance is going to always
come at the cost of power and heat,” he
said. It doesn’t help that the PC’s design
is based on the CPU being the primary
heat generator. With the shift in thermals
from the CPU to the graphics card, Koduri
said we might one day see two types of
formfactors: one for the average Joe and
one for the enthusiast. Both would address
thermal problems, but the enthusiast
design would provide additional cooling
and power for multiple-graphics cards.
It’s also possible that someday the
graphics card will move out of the PC
completely. The PCI Express workgroup
has already ratifi ed an external cable spec
that it claims could one day carry enough
bandwidth to place your graphics card
outside the chassis.Will You Be
Socketing
Your Next
GPU?
8 MA XIMUMPC APRIL 2006
CPUs are getting cooler, but GPUs
are getting hotter. Temperature
management could require GPUs
to move from a card to a socket
quick startTHE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL
With videocards now surpassing CPUs in
thermal output, could the GPU’s days in a
cramped PCI Express slot be numbered?Will You Be
CPU
GPU
?MODEL THERMAL OUTPUT
PENTIUM D 130 watts
GEFORCE 7800 GTX 512MB 122 watts
RADEON X1900XL 120 watts
3.8GHZ PENTIUM 4 115 watts
GEFORCE 6800 ULTRA 110 watts
AMD X2 110 watts
GEFORCE 7800 GTX 256MB 100 watts
GEFORCE 7800 GT 85 watts
GEFORCE 7800 GS 75 watts
ATHLON 64 89 watts
CORE DUO 31 wattsHOW HOT ARE THEY?