
The Modular PC: Intel’s New Element Brings Project Christine to Life - rbanffy
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14953/the-pc-on-a-gpu-intels-new-element-brings-project-christine-to-life
======
MisterTea
> 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.

1994 called. It wants it PICMG 1.0 back.

edit: [https://www.picmg.org/openstandards/pci-
isa/](https://www.picmg.org/openstandards/pci-isa/)

~~~
SI_Rob
1987 has been on the line with AUTOCONFIG [0], but the call was disconnected
in 1995 after being transferred a half dozen times to clueless sales
departments

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig)

~~~
rbanffy
1974 called. The Altair wants its backplane back.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_bus](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_bus)

~~~
MisterTea
Oh how I missed that. And I actually have an 8800b.

~~~
rbanffy
Passive backplanes are a convenient way to organize modular machines with
multiple boards. I really don't get why someone would want this, however. We
already have motherboard and chassis standards and upgrading them is trivial.

And I retro-envy you. ;-)

~~~
MisterTea
Believe it or not it was a dumpster save from work. I was tasked to clean out
the "attic" which built up decades of computing and industrial control
hardware. In addition to the 8800b I took home a complete IBM system 23 and
Franklin Ace 1200.

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tenebrisalietum
So looks we're coming back around to S100-style "motherboards" that were more
correctly called "backplanes"; but with PCIe the interconnect instead of
basically the CPU pins extended to slots.

Interesting these appear to have their own RAM. Similar to how the Pentium
slot CPUs had cache RAM on the slot chassis.

~~~
wmf
RAM (slots) has to be on the same board as the CPU due to signal integrity.

~~~
olliej
also just direct performance - ram speeds these days make line length
important (it's why there are some fun swirls in the traces - getting
identical timings is important and measurable)

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smacktoward
_> We asked about RGB LEDs_

Nobody can say Anandtech has lost sight of the priorities of the enthusiast
community :-D

~~~
AceJohnny2
<groan>

On the other hand, we recently had to build a thermal test fixture at work,
and used off-the-shelf watercooling equipment from "enthusiast PCs". I think
we used the cheap, no-LED version though :p

------
_bxg1
I don't really follow how this is different from normal, motherboard-based
desktops, which are already modular. Can anyone explain?

~~~
smacktoward
Current desktops have two levels of modularity: a PCIe bus connected to the
motherboard which various things are plugged into, and then a set of special
components (like CPU and RAM) that get plugged into the motherboard directly.
This is different in that it makes the PCIe bus the interface for _all_
components, and the "element" housing the CPU and RAM becomes just one more
thing that plugs into it.

In theory this makes tasks like upgrading the CPU easier, since you wouldn't
need to deal with things like the old and new CPUs using different sockets;
you'd just pull out the old Element and plug in a new one, the exact same way
you upgrade (say) your GPU.

There are (in theory) downsides too, of course. If the CPU moves into a sealed
package, for instance, your options for cooling it are going to be limited to
whatever fans/etc. come on the package; you wouldn't be able to buy and use
beefier third-party coolers, the way you can now since you have direct access
to the processor. That's not a huge issue for most people, but if you're an
overclocker it'd be a serious pain point.

~~~
swiley
Isn’t PCIe a little slow compared to (say) qpi? Won’t this just mean you’re
waiting on memory more often?

~~~
blattimwind
QPI/UPI is not used in single processor systems. DMI is literally PCIe. You
would however need quite a number of PCIe lanes to achieve the bandwidth of a
128 bit DDR4/5 interface.

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jaytaylor
Here's a thought:

What if, instead, Intel began keeping a single socket revision alive for
longer than 1 release cycle of CPU?

This seems like the fundamental issue. I remember ~20 years ago when there
were only 2 sockets for x86 to worry about: Intel P4 & AMD Athlon.
Motherboards lasted at least a generation or two, it was nice.

~~~
dbcurtis
Memory bandwidth. You can’t make the code run faster without more ability to
move data to and from mamory.

All questions about modern CPU architecture get down to two questions of first
principle: How much memory bandwidth is available? How is the available die
area being used?

~~~
BubRoss
This is not true at all. I think you might mean memory latency. Modern CPUs
are primarily designed around memory latency.

Very few programs are limited by memory bandwidth. At that point you have done
a good job of optimizing already.

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api
This sounds like ancient zeroeth-generation PCs that used things like the
S-100 bus:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_bus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_bus)

This was also a single bus that almost everything plugged into.

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mrkstu
Apple's Mac Pro is moving this direction with the new IO Card hosting the
USB/thunderbolt/audio connections. These trends definitely come in waves.

~~~
oneplane
Yeah, this seems to come and go every 7 or 8 years. Always breaking with the
previous attempt while still trying to achieve the same thing. Probably
contributes to the reason some of the industrial modular stuff moves so slow.

~~~
analognoise
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

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primis
I feel like this would limit the number of PCIe lanes you could pull off the
cpu though unless there was some black magic trickery happening here

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TwoNineA
Looks like a cooling nightmare.

~~~
oneplane
Looks like a laptop squished into a GPU form factor

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Zardoz84
So, they reinvent s-100 bus computers ?

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NicoJuicy
Modular pc's, but on top of Intell.

Yeah, that's a fundamental mistake. I'm not seeing what problem they want to
solve also. PC's are the most modular hardware I have.

~~~
jplayer01
Worked a while as a PC technician. Something like this would've saved a lot of
time and effort when testing/replacing parts. I don't see what's wrong with
more modularisation.

~~~
makapuf
I don't see it as more modularisation -if I understand that word correctly -
there are less configurable elements than on a PC it seems. What can you
substitute here that you can't on a pc ? Or maybe it's the fact that you can
add several elements in it, I.e. it's a blade server ?

~~~
jplayer01
Well, right now, if you want to buy a new CPU, you have to buy a new
mainboard. Modularized in this way, you buy the add-in card which contains RAM
slots and new socket/CPU. So you don't need to buy a new mainboard anymore.
Explain how there's _less_ configurable elements.

~~~
makapuf
Not saying there are less configurable elements but I fail to see how there
are _more_. How is the cpu/memory board different from a main board for
standard users ? What will prevent the back plane from being obsolete with new
cpu boards ?

