Future cards: smaller chips? thicker? longer?

[terminus]

At the moment the longest GPUs out there are 10.5" (barley fitting in most ATX cases) and it seems the trend is to keep on making the GPU card length longer. However I was wondering what do you guys think will happen to the physical card size of the future high-end GPUs?

-Will they stay at 10.5" or keep getting longer?

-Will they get thicker maybe even taking up 3 slots?

-Will the size stay generally the same, but with smaller chips?

 

[spathotan]

Video cards are contradictory, they go backwards and against everything their makers claim and the direction the tech is headed. Actually the PC itself is going backwards, as i7 is even bigger than LGA 775 chips. Power supplies are getting bigger...heatsinks are getting bigger......its an ill fate.

Cards PCB's will continue to get longer
Coolers will remain 2 slots and heavy
The actual GPU chip is shrinking with ATI but getting bigger with Nvidia, yet the thermals are about the same, actually slightly better with Nvidia as the 4000 series run extremely hot.

 

[Dekasav]

I think you should change your wording. I thought you were talking about chips themselves, not cards. Cards will continue to get longer, though I don't see them going past 12" except on super-high end and dual/quad-GPU cards.

Though, on the other hand, there seems to be a push for faster memory, as a big reason PCBs are so big/long is because they need so many traces, faster memory allows for smaller bus width and equal memory thoroughput (HD 4870's GDDR5 @ 256-bit vs. GTX 260 GDDR3 @ 448-bit), so cards may not actually get longer.

I don't think cards will ever hit 3 slots, though, I don't think the cooling will improve much beyond 2 slot cooling.

As far as actual chips go, I don't think they'll get much bigger. More transistors, yes, but bigger, not so much. GTX 200 or GTX 300 will, in my predictions, go down as the largest (in mm^2) chips produced. I think Nvidia will go with a path closer to ATi's.

 

[terminus]

dan...I was thinking about getting the Antec 902 case, but it seems 10.5" cards are the max they have space for.

 

[jennyh]

They will get smaller as components get smaller. We are already at the stage where the hardware is too good for the software to keep up. There is really no reason why gpu's won't go true multi core like cpu's are now...certainly i cannot see any gpu that will be larger in size than the g200 is.

I'm equally sure ATI and Nvidia fanboys will argue over 10fps when both cards are in the 1000's however.

 

[turboflame]

There is really no reason why gpu's won't go true multi core like cpu's are now

GPUs are already highly multi threaded and have been for some time now.