[Teever]

That's what I was hoping Apple was going to do with a refreshed Mac Pro.

I had envisoned a smaller tower design that with PCI slots and Apple developing and selling daughter cards that were basically just a redesigned macbook pro PCB but with a PCI-E edge connector and power connector.

The way I see it a user could start with a reasonably powerful base machine and then upgrade it over time and mix and match different daughter cards. A ten year old desktop is fine as a day to day driver, it just needs some fancy NPU to do fancy AI stuff.

This kind of architecture seems to make sense to me in an age where computers have such a longer usable lifespan and where so many features are integrated into the motherboard.

[raw_anon_1111]

You can do basically that by connecting over Thunderbolt 5

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46248644

[bigyabai]

Homogenous RDMA is less like a daughterboard and more like a brother or sisterboard.

[bombcar]

M5 processor plugged into the same RDMA as IBM POWER for that "brother from anothermotherboard".

[Grosvenor]

Apple already experimented with this with the prototype Jonathan computer. It's very late 80's in its aesthetic, and I love it.

https://512pixels.net/2024/03/apple-jonathan-modular-concept...

[bombcar]

This is the kind of glorious thing that will only appear when Moore's law is dead and buried.