look at the size of 4090 and think again
Side note: Most of those high end audio interfaces are now external devices connected via USB (formerly also via Firewire).
And since a DAW typically doesn’t need high end video, I didn’t bother with a separate GPU on my latest DAW build. I will only add a GPU card, if I ever want to do higher end gaming, video production or machine learning on that computer.
Pairing a 4090 + a CPU on the same chip/side by side would be a stretch, but it has nothing to do with physical size - more the motherboard needing to handle power delivery, and the separate memory not being fast enough. Something like a 3060 is probably more reasonable.
This already exists too - the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S both use APUs with much more powerful GPUs than are available as standalone purchases.
4090 have die area of ~600mm2
Ryzen 7 have 71mm2 CPU die and 122mm2 IO die
It's not even fucking comparable
> CPUs would be the same size if they had all that stuff on their own discrete board too
Oh, oh, I know, we can call the board that has all the power and IO CPU needs a "motherboard" cos it cradles the CPU in its hold (socket). Oh, wait, that's exactly how it is.
You're comparing a ~$350 CPU to a ~$1600 GPU.
Intel and Ryzens consumer chips both follow the same marketing formula:
> Celeron/Athlon: ultra low end
> Ryzen 3/i3: low end
> Ryzen 5/i5: mid range
> Ryzen 7/i7: high end
> Ryzen 9/i9: I have money coming out of my ears and want a bigger number than everyone else.
CPUs in general are cheaper than GPUs - spending the same amount on the CPU as the GPU has almost never been the right move.
The fact that you have to move out of the consumer product range and into the workstation stuff to even find CPUs that cost as much as high end consumer GPUs should make that clear - the GPU equivalent in that space would be stuff like Quadros or RTX AXXX, which just like threadrippers and epycs are worse for gaming because they focus on memory and stability rather than raw power.
The pricing for Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 overlap. The Ryzen 9 7900 costs less than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. And Ryzen 9 has better performance per dollar than Ryzen 7 on threaded workloads. The demarcation for "I have money coming out of my ears and want a bigger number than everyone else" is where dollars start going up faster than performance, which is unambiguously Threadripper/HEDT.
But Threadripper actually is significantly faster for the kind AI workload that would otherwise be done on a GPU, or for which a fast iGPU would make sense, because it has traditinally had twice as many memory channels. If Zen 4 Threadripper ends up on Socket SP6, it will have three times as many memory channels as Socket AM5.
Zen 4-based Ryzen 3 doesn't exist and there hasn't been a new Zen-based Athlon for desktop since Zen+ three years ago.
> Epyc 9654 has 12xCCD
That's $7k CPU you're comparing to $1600 GPU
The 9354P is $2,730 and still has 8 CCD. That's >60% more than the 4090, but it's also >60% bigger, because Epyc has a ~400mm2 I/O die on top of the CCDs.
I'm not really sure what you're arguing so aggressively about - are you saying it's impossible to pair a CPU + a high end GPU on a single board? Because as I mentioned this already exists in the PS5 and XBSX, they could sell this in the PC space if they wanted to.