ATI's Radeon to move to separate case?

EVERY NOW and then there are rumours of graphics firms moving the chips outside of the PC and into a separate case.

These rumours have started to become more persistent again. This time it's AMD-ATI that is the target of the rumours and there are some sketchy details.

It can't have escaped many people's notice that power requirements for CPUs have crept up over the years but GPUs have leapt up. Add to that ever increasing size and cooling requirements for GPUs and something had to give.

It's already known that the ex-ATI-now-AMD engineers have been working on multi-chip graphics platforms.

There have even been hints that AMD and ATI first started taking about a merger because of ATI's wish to use a variant of AMD's Crossbar but that's a different rumour.

Those multi-chip platforms should make things more scaleable and flexible but they're going to take up a lot of space. Probably more than your average one, two or three PCIe cards want to offer if it's done properly.

This brings the story back around to separate cases with one for CPU/memory/drives and one for graphics. It would solve a lot of problems. Separate power, separate cooling, plenty of space, etc. And AMD has already worked with Cray amongst others on using a HyperTransport link direct from the CPUs to external boxes. It's not like the small amount of latency there would matter; it's bandwidth that counts when connecting to graphics.

Rumours of separate cases for graphics regularly pop up but this time they've been a bit more sticky and detailed. It could be nothing. Maybe it is just a rumour. Or it could just be a bit of R&D that's going to be ditched or shrunk. But maybe, just maybe, this time it's for real.

ATI-AMD declined to comment. µ