
The Asus Prime Utopia is a radical concept for the future of motherboards - dmayle
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/29/18643912/asus-prime-utopia-motherboard-concept-computex-2019
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dmayle
I was a bit surprised to see this coming out of ASUS, as the logical
conclusion to designs like this is the complete commoditization of the
motherboard. I think, however, they got things right in that the current
specifications on case/mounting/power are detrimental to the future value and
growth of computing.

Motherboards used to be pretty standard fare: CPU socket, RAM slots, expansion
slots, with differentiation coming from peripheral, BIOS, and
stability/overclockability. Nowadays, CPU manufacturers have taken over a
segment of the differentiation (chipset, or platform capabilities), so most of
the differentiation is in aesthetics and branding. In this world, the grab bag
of peripherals become a tradeoff, the cost per unit versus the percentage of
market share it opens. Manufacturers have to increase their overall cost per
unit in order to get access to the users who each have their own must-have
peripherals.

Something like this moves things in the right direction by removing a lot of
the overhead in motherboard manufacturing. If you look at the bandwidth
required for todays peripherals, even in the most maxed out possible
configuration, you won't be able to saturate an x16 PCIe 3.0 link: * 1.2 GB/s
10Gb Ethernet * 3.0 GB/s 6 SATA ports * 9.6 GB/s 8 USB 3.1 ports * 0.2 GB/s
Wifi 6 * 0.1 GB/s Audio

The Utopia concept allows for multiple mini-PCIe blocks, but you could
simplify it and just make the case one big PCIe device that handles IO.

USB4 goes a bit beyond that, with each port using up to an x4 PCIe 3.0 link,
so you might want have direct access to motherboard USB4 slots (especially
since this allows exposing integrated graphics cards via alternate mode).

I hope one day to see the motherboard simplified to a plug-in card which holds
CPU socket and RAM sockets, and exposes PCIe and M.2 slots for connectivity.

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PascLeRasc
I agree that while ASUS's implementation might not be "it", and I'd imagine
that if they released that today it'd be a proprietary mess, they have the
right idea that there's a lot to gain from moving I/O off the motherboard to
expansion cards/slots. Right now I'd bet most PC enthusiasts barely use any of
the motherboard's integrated I/O except for USB and maybe ethernet. Mini-ITX
is especially limited by ATX's growing pains - just a single PCIe x16 slot for
expansion. If instead of the integrated I/O we had several Mini-PCIe slots to
pick and choose I/O like Thunderbolt, wifi, 10GbE, optical audio, etc, I think
there'd be a much more vibrant PC ecosystem and motherboards could see much
longer longevity.

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anfilt
Err arn't current moth-boards modular? I can put various things in PCIe slots.

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kozak
Is this the modular Mac Pro everyone's waiting for (not from aesthetics point
of view, of course)?

~~~
666lumberjack
Aside from the Apple-y-ness and aesthetics of whatever the module attachment
system ends up being, how is the expected/desired modular Mac Pro any
different from a regular desktop PC?

~~~
dmayle
I suspect the major innovation they're looking for is usability. I can really
only think of a single product that is both modular, and very usable in it's
modularity, and that would be cameras (not the point and shoot variety).

You have a few major camera systems to work within, but aside from that
variable, body, storage, mount, flash, lenses are modular and exchangeable in
a very usable way.

When it comes to computing, most IO could be made readily modular, as PCIe is
quite stable, and the bandwidth needs are easily exposed.

Where the problem comes, however, is making compute and RAM modular.
Connecting multiple compute units with multiple RAM elements is a completely
different problem than IO expansion, as the devices are much more sensitive to
trace length and layout, and much higher bandwidth.

If the expected/desired Mac Pro is truly going to be fully modular, then I
suspect it will have to be NUMA, and have a compute backplane separate from
IO.

I'm imagining compute blocks that have RAM plugged directly to CPU that can be
connected to the compute backplane (something like QPI, UPI, or
InfinityFabric) that also has an IO block attached. One big problem is that
these interconnects are proprietary, which means any IO unit plugged into that
backplane will only be useful for that brand of processor.

The problem with this, however, is you lose access to CPU-exported PCIe
bandwidth, which is very valuable (e.g. for GPU links). If you don't want to
lose that, than you're back to a compute unit with one point of modularity,
the RAM, a second point of modularity, PCIe/USB4, and a third point of
modularity, CPU interconnect/backplane.

It's probably possible to deliver a design that enables this, but it's a very
tough problem, and hasn't yet been solved.

~~~
scifi6546
What is interesting is that a lot of old computers operated by this standard
where you would have one big backplane and a lot of IO cpu's etc attached to
that. I find it interesting how we have gone full circle. I do not understand
what the use of modularity would be. Modern gaming rigs are already fairly
modular. The only trick is that a lot of peripherals are not hot-swappable
which I have trouble understanding why one (outside of the server and
mainframe world of course) would want a hot-swappable gpu or cpu.

