Damn, the things used to be these thin little, well, cards. Nowadays they are reaching the size of entire consoles and can more accurately be called graphics bricks. Is the tech so stagnant that they won't be getting smaller again in the future?
The high end ones are so huge, power hungry, and fucking expensive that I'm starting to think they might as well just come with an integrated CPU and system RAM (in addition to the VRAM) on the same board.
What is the general industry expectation of what GPUs are going to be like in the mid term future, maybe 20 to 30 years from now? I expect if AI continues to grow in scope and ubiquity, then a previously unprecedented amount of effort and funding is going to be thrown at R&D for these PC components that were once primarily relegated to being toys for gamers.
Integrated cpu xD
I wouldn't rule that out actually. NVIDIA did buy Mellanox so they could integrate Infiniband with NVIDIA GPUs more directly so you can have fancier GPU clusters. At that point, having a powerful CPU and associated infrastructure is kind of pointless. I guess they'll end up looking like whatever SANs (storage area network, i.e. all the hard drives are separate from the compute servers) look like.
For consumer stuff, obviously idk. I think the giant GPUs are maybe because people are willing to buy them. The actual GPU itself provided by NVIDIA or AMD or Intel is actually a tiny little thing that looks like a CPU.
(GPU board without fans and plastic cover, you can see the GPU chip in the middle taking up a small part of the board)
And when they're on a laptop, it's just that actual GPU that's soldered onto the motherboard.
So GPUs themselves aren't actually getting that much bigger. I don't know if it's the memory, power, or the fans that are the cause of the massive GPU board sizes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/14n4uus/why_are_graphics_cards_getting_so_big/jq5bpgr/
I almost wonder if custom-built desktop computers will eventually go away. I feel like it would be a lot more efficient to just have the CPU and GPU soldered onto the same motherboard the same way a laptop would. Then they could both share a common cooling and power infrastructure.
And maybe liquid cooling will become more popular.
Maybe some day there will be a massive breakthrough in computer part cooling. But refrigerants are already a thing I guess, and that's what liquid cooling is.
Look at how small a 4090 is without the heatsink:
Only Intel and AMD could do it any time soon, since licensing to make x86-64 CPUs will never let Nvidia build them
That's only if it's x86_64 and not ARM or RISC-V and only if NVIDIA is designing the CPU themselves which they wouldn't do. Desktop/industrial motherboards just have a socket that fits a certain CPU pinout.