Proposed style of placing the GPU on the motherboard...

DISCLAIMER: This report or any diagrams are converted into simple diagram from Singapore IT magazine: The Strait Times Digital Life of April 4, 2006, page 20. Anyone has not rights to copy or extract any lines or pictures without acknowledgement.

This is the diagramatic representation of the future motherboard:

Picture courtesy of Digital Life (Page 20) and Maximium PC - Extracted on April 5 2006

As I had recently posted that there is possibility that future GPU will run faster in GHz and not MHz. Proposed cooling for these future fast GPU must be initiated as current coolants are not effective enough to cool the GPU to recommended temp. of 50 degree celcius. So many IT researchers have came out with this idea - socketed GPU. This idea is not new. Actually, it had been experimented in 1998 but it was not that successful. This socketed GPU will not have discrete memory chips like what it has now. It need to get the memory space from the memory chips slotted onboard in the memory slots. Why it was not successful? Now the fastest GPUs like nVidia GeForce 7900GTX or ATI Radeon X1900XTX are running on GDDR3 memory which is the world's fastest memory chips from Samsung. Currently, fastest memory chip slotted on the motherboard is only DDR2-667, one step slower than GDDR3 with seek time of 1.0ns. Even if the socketed GPU has Turbocache (from nVidia) or Hypermemory (from ATI), it will still work slower than GPUs with discrete GDDR3 memory. Lastest games like TimeShift which needs high speed memory chip. Another reason is that the heat produced from the CPU may pass on to the nearby GPU, warming up the GPU unnecessary. There are also other component parts on the motherboard, thus, the whole system may need more power to run. Type of sockets to use, also a problem. It is going to be LGA or mPGA based.

In my opinion, it is not really impossible to use this idea. User can slot in memory cards up to 4GB which is good enough, unlike fixed memory space on discrete graphic cards. Currently, IT researchers are still looking and reviewing the idea. Let's wait for Samsung to mass produce DDR4 memory chips and see how it works.