ML folks definitely load their systems up with GPUs. Having gobs of slots makes complete sense. It's not SLI, that doesn't seem to be happening at the moment, but scaling out pretty great!
But all the companies making PCIe switches have gotten bought out & consolidated & now making a high-PCIe-slot motherboard costs absurd bazonga-bucks. The market has priced itself out of reasonability.
You're thinking of SLI/Crossfire, I think. Multi-GPU has always and will always be a thing, as long as your CPU exposes enough PCI bandwidth to address both cards.
This has been slowly running around in my head since this morning, and I'm more and more impressed.
> Skulltrail was one of the first platforms to support SLI on chipsets not designed by Nvidia. It achieves this by including two NVIDIA nForce 100 PCIe 1.1 switch (two x16 to one x16) chips. The implementation of SLI supports Quad SLI technology, which is achieved through the use of two dual-GPU graphics cards from NVIDIA, including the GeForce 9800 GX2. This gives a total of four graphics processors.
Nvidia specifically (via licensing) forbid SLI unless GPUs were connected to a Nvidia chip[1]. So Intel just bought two Nvidia PCIe switches & put all the big x16 slots behind these switches, and the GPU processors would happily run in SLI. It's basically a cheezy hardware hack to on the sly subvert a shitty fascist meanspirited company, that was playing gross monopolistic anti-PC market games. Fuck Nvidia man! Fuck yeah Intel, fuck these jackasses!
Skulltrail indeed! A great historical case of Nvidia being absolute shits, and finally someone actually having a one up on jerk-ish behavior! Go Intel!
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 45.0 ms ] threadCinebench R10:
1x CPU suite (higher is better)
- 12700k: 8899
- Duel Intel Extreme: 4815
All CPUs suite
- 12700k: 63393
- Duel Intel Extreme: 29108
Obviously these tests aren't conclusive. I'm using Wine, and Cinebench R10 isn't optimized for the modern Intel chipsets. Still was fun to test :)
[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/2435/11
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNo7qoLRtkQ
But all the companies making PCIe switches have gotten bought out & consolidated & now making a high-PCIe-slot motherboard costs absurd bazonga-bucks. The market has priced itself out of reasonability.
It seems semi likely we'll see multi-GPU again on real consumer, in the next 10 years.
> Skulltrail was one of the first platforms to support SLI on chipsets not designed by Nvidia. It achieves this by including two NVIDIA nForce 100 PCIe 1.1 switch (two x16 to one x16) chips. The implementation of SLI supports Quad SLI technology, which is achieved through the use of two dual-GPU graphics cards from NVIDIA, including the GeForce 9800 GX2. This gives a total of four graphics processors.
Nvidia specifically (via licensing) forbid SLI unless GPUs were connected to a Nvidia chip[1]. So Intel just bought two Nvidia PCIe switches & put all the big x16 slots behind these switches, and the GPU processors would happily run in SLI. It's basically a cheezy hardware hack to on the sly subvert a shitty fascist meanspirited company, that was playing gross monopolistic anti-PC market games. Fuck Nvidia man! Fuck yeah Intel, fuck these jackasses!
Skulltrail indeed! A great historical case of Nvidia being absolute shits, and finally someone actually having a one up on jerk-ish behavior! Go Intel!
[1] LTT, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNo7qoLRtkQ#t=7m