Way back at CES 2014, Razer’s CEO introduced a revolutionary concept design for a PC that had one main backplane and users could insert a CPU, GPU, power supply, storage, and anything else in a modular fashion. Fast forward to 2020, and Intel is aiming to make this idea a reality. Today at a fairly low-key event in London, Intel’s Ed Barkhuysen showcased a new product, known simply as an ‘Element’ – a CPU/DRAM/Storage on a dual-slot PCIe card, with Thunderbolt, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and USB, designed to slot into a backplane with multiple PCIe slots, and paired with GPUs or other accelerators. Behold, Christine is real, and it’s coming soon.
Anything to compete with the default ATX design of a PC is welcome, and this looks incredibly interesting.
We had that in the 70s. It was called the S-100 bus.
Heck, even classical PCs weren’t too far from that. Different connectors but they used to be basically just glue between a bunch of sockets providing comms and power.
You’d plug in a video card, an I/O card, pop a cpu in a socket, clip in some simms or DIP RAM chips, connect power, and away you go.
But then we put everything into one or two chips, soldered to a motherboard, and glued on a battery…
As a PDP-11 enthusiast, i can say that backplanes date back further than that.
So we’re at a point where computers have been refined to have small/tiny optimized footprints and use minimal parts, and the next step from here is to undo all of that, put everything on its own `plug-and-play` card, and stick it all into a big ol` pc case.
I think I missed the part where this is the future.
There are some natural limitations to these kind of designs. This also has contributed to the “monotone” design of the modern motherboards.
First the speed of light restricts how far you can place the components. Along with heat dissipation issues you have to mount the CPU next to DRAM for best performance. Vertical CPU mounts would add precious nanoseconds to latency, along with more difficulty for airflow. (Light travels 300m in a microsecond, and 30cm in a nanosecond. So a 3GHz clock allows at most 10cm of travel).
Standardization has cost optimization has contributed moving lots of functionality together on a single chip (or embedded motherboard components). As long as you have goof RF and acoustic shielding, the Ethernet, sound, and even WiFi would go on board.
Two things we still change are GPUs and storage. m.2/nvme is not plug and play, so there is still potential for improvement there.
GPUs can now be external / plug an play. However the Thunderbird port only allows PCIe 4x speed, which is not sufficient to satisfy higher end cards (1070 and upper). That that would also benefit from improvement.
But I like to experiment with new form factors. I recently switched form miniITX to Intel NUC. Obviously there is a limit on performance (I would say about 50% loss at load), due to physical and thermal limitations. However the form factor makes it a nice compromise.
The prototypes in the article seem to go in a similar way. If we can mount a GPU directly on top of a NUC (along with external PSU/cooling), and have a plug and play nvme it would satisfy most needs.
“he prototypes in the article seem to go in a similar way. If we can mount a GPU directly on top of a NUC (along with external PSU/cooling), and have a plug and play nvme it would satisfy most needs.”
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At what price point? Why do I get the feeling that these motherboards are going to be overpriced POS like Apple’s?