If you aren’t familiar with the Amen Break, here’s a now classic 18 minute documentary on the Amen Break and its origins and evolution:

https://youtu.be/5SaFTm2bcac?si=J99_Sh9x3fIBCSms

Yeah, it used to be true that server GPUs at least somewhat resembled their gaming counterparts (i.e. Nvidia Tesla server components from 12+ years ago); they were still PCIe cards, just with server-optimized coolers, and fundamentally shared the same dies that the gaming and professional cards used.

That stopped being true many years ago though, and the divergence has only accelerated with the advent of AI datacenter usage. The form factor is now fundamentally different (SXM instead of PCIe); you can adapt an SXM card to PCIe with some effort [1], but that may not even be worthwhile because 1. the power and cooling requirements for the SXM cards are radically different than a desktop part and more importantly 2. the dies are no longer even close to being the same. IIRC, Blackwell AI chips straight up don't have rasterization hardware onboard at all; internally they look like a moderate number of general SMs attached to a huge number of tensor core. Modern AI GPUs are fundamentally optimized for, well, mat-mults, which is not at all what you want for gaming or really any non-AI application.

[1] https://l4rz.net/running-nvidia-sxm-gpus-in-consumer-pcs/

I hadn't seen arun.is before; I really like this one! Thanks for the share!

One I like is Tom Macwright’s blog [1], which somewhat famously loads insanely fast thanks to having a sort of the web equivalent of a brutalist design while still looking nice [2].

[1] https://macwright.com/

[2] https://macwright.com/2016/05/03/the-featherweight-website