In the olden days of the 1990s and early 2000s, PCs were big and videocards were small-ish add-in boards that blended in with other ISA, PCI and AGP cards. These days, however, videocards are big and computers are increasingly smaller. That’s why US-based CherryTree Computers did what everyone has been joking about, and installed a PC inside a GPU, with [Gamers Nexus] having the honors of poking at the creatively titled GeeFarce 5027POS Micro Computer.
As CherryTree describes it on their website, this one-off build was the result of a joke about how GPUs nowadays are more expensive than the rest of the PC combined. Thus they did what any reasonable person would do and put an Asus NUC 13 with a 13th gen Core i7, 64 GB of and 2 TB of NVMe storage inside an (already dead) Asus Aorus RTX 2070 GPU.
In the [Gamers Nexus] video we can see that it’s definitely a quick-and-dirty build, with plenty of heatshrink and wires running everywhere in addition to the chopped off original heatsink. That said, from a few meter away it still looks like a GPU, can be installed like a GPU (but the PCIe connector does nothing) and is in the end a NUC PC inside a GPU shell that you can put a couple of inside a PC case.
Presumably the next project we’ll see in this vein will see a full-blown x86 system grafted inside a still functioning GPU, which would truly make the ‘install the PC inside the GPU’ meme a reality.
The irony is a modern GPU is just nine chips (GPU + VRAM). All the rest of the bulk is power and heat management.
Jeff Geerling (Mr. Let’s hook up a Raspberry Pi to a GPU), what’s keeping you? :-)
Honestly I’ve had this project in my todo list for a while, but wanted to get a 3090… then 4090… now 5090… but so far have not been able to get those cards to work on Pi.
Maybe I should bite the bullet and go with an AMD card instead. A PCB and some form of PCIe and PSU integration could make it nice and compact. I want it to be less janky than this setup :)
Yo, dawg. We heard you like CPUs.
It is a slot SBC, except that the slot is not doing anything here.
Now I’m picturing someone taking one of those mining system boards that have a ton of PCIe slots and populating it with these. Get the SBC powered from the PCI bus and slot ’em in!
I think you may want to look into the Nuc Extreme. It had an edge connector, but I think if was for the daughterboard to connect to the GPU. But it would be the correct form factor. See Der8auer video on it from a few years ago, I think he took Kapton tape to the connector so he could plug it into his PC.
Or just use a few shaders and some GPGpu
And basically use it like a cpu
To use a simile to a South Park episode: “AMD already did it!”
Let me present to you the BC-250 mining card: a Zen2 processor with RDNA2 GPU on a PCIe card, complete with its own network and USB ports. Originally sold by Asrock as a 12-node server.