Kinda hard to do when so many GPU vendors slap their memory and power circuits all over the place. Even if the die is in the same place cooler manufacturers would need to test fit a bajillion models, and on top of that they’d need insane R&D budgets to keep up with new additions, sometimes coming years after the original gpu comes out
Modularity is nice — both for personal preference reasons and incentivizing-market-competition reasons — but it does come at a cost.
The thing is: even in our modular world right now, you don’t really have many choices. Two CPU companies, three GPU companies (two of them being the same as the CPU companies)…
We could someday have a world where PC hardware is technically less modular than it is today but consumers have more choices in the marketplace than they do today.
iGPUs should have been a better option, but they were hamstrung by PCI conventions and graphics APIs favoring discrete VRAM.
(Just look at how x86 SoC consoles run circles around similar-spec PCs.)
I’m hoping that ARM is a chance to reset.
I do like the modularity of discrete GPUs though.
But a cooling setup similar to CPUs would’ve been better for airflow.
Kinda hard to do when so many GPU vendors slap their memory and power circuits all over the place. Even if the die is in the same place cooler manufacturers would need to test fit a bajillion models, and on top of that they’d need insane R&D budgets to keep up with new additions, sometimes coming years after the original gpu comes out
Modularity is nice — both for personal preference reasons and incentivizing-market-competition reasons — but it does come at a cost.
The thing is: even in our modular world right now, you don’t really have many choices. Two CPU companies, three GPU companies (two of them being the same as the CPU companies)…
We could someday have a world where PC hardware is technically less modular than it is today but consumers have more choices in the marketplace than they do today.