I was just reading the Anand article about the Radeon M200 Series and thinking how disappointing it was. Rebadges and GPUs which make current APUs look good. As was wondering what was the point of releasing such weak mobile GPUs and a commenter pointed out that they could work in dual mode with APUs. This could give truly small form factor PCs a fair bit of graphical power.
This got me thinking about crossfire. Instead of crossfiring GPUs or an APU with a GPU, why not put the APU on a card and crossfire that?
We can already make tiny motherboards, for example, the Intel NUC is around 116.6mm x 112.0mm whereas a high end GPU has a size of around
275mm x 106.7mm.
So, it's possible to fit a complete motherboard and APU into the space of an extension card. You wouldn't need the full features of a standard motherboard though, as you wouldn't require all the various I/O ports, they would exist on the backplane the cards plug into.
If we ditched the socket design for the motherboard in favour of a card based APU design, what else would need to change to allow multiple cards to work with each other?
This got me thinking about crossfire. Instead of crossfiring GPUs or an APU with a GPU, why not put the APU on a card and crossfire that?
We can already make tiny motherboards, for example, the Intel NUC is around 116.6mm x 112.0mm whereas a high end GPU has a size of around
275mm x 106.7mm.
So, it's possible to fit a complete motherboard and APU into the space of an extension card. You wouldn't need the full features of a standard motherboard though, as you wouldn't require all the various I/O ports, they would exist on the backplane the cards plug into.
If we ditched the socket design for the motherboard in favour of a card based APU design, what else would need to change to allow multiple cards to work with each other?
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