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.

  • chickentendrils [any, comrade/them]
    ·
    10 months ago

    A lot of it's heat dispersion, which goes back to how much electricity these things are using.

    But the components are bigger, the first PC I assembled as a kid had 128 stream processors but the 40 series GPUs go up to 16384 cores. CUDA cores are a lot bigger too, despite die shrinks. More memory and associated components.