Yes you've got me totally on the spot with that bold bit for sure! They could have released a dual or quad core xeon e5 box with lots of ram and PCIe slots but they decided to take another path, one which I didn't really understand why on earth they did when they first announced it as I prefer a single box solution too.
It took a while for it to sink in and then only hit home after speaking to my friend outside the industry while explaining this design. He got very enthusiastic about this 'core' for his equipment, with excellent heat transfer and just the single moving part - the fan. He has 5/6 fans like many rack mount servers have, cooling dead spots etc and would like to banish as many as possible as by far they are the biggest culprit of failures of his boxes. He hasn't placed a nMP order to use it, only to strip and study it. I would describe him too as a 'Tutor' much like yourself in his line of work, I absorb technical information like a sponge so it's never dull and boring and I always come away having learned something new. It was very nice to pass him the light bulb and give him the idea to explore this concept for his business. In your case I have read your main thread from beginning to end and that's a complement!
Then I had a nMP on my desk for not even a whole day, it wasn't just what it could do using only 450 watts of energy that impressed me a lot but most was how surreally quiet it was while it was doing it. The heat under load is a gentle breeze and barely audible. For someone who has been in the business since 1988 having a silent workstation under full load designed for video work next to my keyboard simply does not compute - error, they are not supposed to be like this. Although some have derided my comments as a religious epiphany it's no different in my case to when Faraday put an animal in his cage and threw the switch. Perhaps some in the audience in the RI thought it was magic with lack of understanding but for me its scientific reasoning, plain and simple and makes complete and utter sense.
If I could expand this future by a bit of imagination bear with me - it's a total redesign of what we define as a traditional PC and the ripping up of this tradition into something I don't know exactly where it will go but will surely head in the direction I'm thinking of, with twists and turns no doubt!
A larger thermal core like the nMP's guts inside a big rectangular box laid horizontally, with more bays to fit the logic board(s) with PCIe cable interconnects to the other bays which house the GPU's such as the future models you currently use. These would obviously have to be shorter cards than the full length cards you use today else the core will be too high but a lot of these larger cards are so big because of their individual cooling requirements for a standalone card. Longer most likely than the Dx00 models in the nMP though, with the GPU die and the VRAM on the core side of the PCB for binding. The fan less switch mode PSU underneath the core and on top the fan which like the nMP sucks air through the core and the switch, leaving the open space away from the core inside the enclosure to store items which doesn't require such active cooling like SSD and spinning disks.
If you take this concept and apply it to one of your rigs, throw away the superfluous cooling I wonder what efficiencies could be made on a rig built in 2019 using separate logic and GPU cards with this thermal core single fan concept?
I knew this would be a really really long reply as you deserve one and I haven't covered even half what I wanted to (so remind me what else I still have to cover please) but I have to cut it short as it's past midnight here in the UK and I have to get up and get the kids ready for school as the missus has been unwell since the weekend. No rest for the wicked they say but I'm not so bad - bloody knackered more like!
Looking forward writing to another essay sometime tomorrow sir - goodnight!
