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ASUS will sell a motherboard that can support 19 GPUs. The product is intended for cryptocurrency mining:
ASUS this week teased the new "B250 Mining Expert" which boasts all those slots because – as the name implies – its role in life is mining cryptocurrency.
The board can't do it all itself, of course. ASUS' preferred GPU is the P106, a variant of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1060), 1,280-CUDA-core, 1,506MHz affair that can surge to 1,708 MHz when required and boasts 6GB of RAM. ASUS' version is shorn of anything to do with displaying video so that it can smoke hashes to cook cryptocurrency.
Do the math: 19 GPUS, 1,280 cores apiece ... this motherboard could end up hosting 24,320 cores before you fill the Intel LGA 1511 socket with a Skylake, Kaby Lake or Coffee Lake CPU. That chip's half-dozen or so cores are hardly worth counting!
The board is also equipped to slurp three power supplies, because all those GPUs are thirsty. There's also a capacitor dedicated to each PCIe slot to make sure the juice doesn't fluctuate and upset the precious mining machines. A mining-specific BIOS that lets you manage all those GPUs rounds things out.
What do you do with this after cryptocurrency mining is dead?
(Score: 2) by forkazoo on Friday August 25 2017, @11:49PM
There are enough inefficiencies that a lot of real world data centers are shockingly close to the 1:1 rule of thumb, even if it can theoretically be much better. If you have an air conditioning unit on the top of a nine story building that pushes air down to a second floor data center and back up to an exhaust on the top, you use more energy than just the heat pump. You may say that's a stupid design, but a lot of things are both stupid and exist. /shrug.
Indeed, the general wisdom is that computers are almost 100% perfectly efficient electric heaters, that leak a very small amount of energy as math!