The Asus Prime Utopia is a radical concept for the future of motherboards
theverge.com
theverge.com
Motherboards used to be pretty standard fare: CPU socket, RAM slots, expansion slots, with differentiation coming from peripheral, BIOS, and stability/overclockability. Nowadays, CPU manufacturers have taken over a segment of the differentiation (chipset, or platform capabilities), so most of the differentiation is in aesthetics and branding. In this world, the grab bag of peripherals become a tradeoff, the cost per unit versus the percentage of market share it opens. Manufacturers have to increase their overall cost per unit in order to get access to the users who each have their own must-have peripherals.
Something like this moves things in the right direction by removing a lot of the overhead in motherboard manufacturing. If you look at the bandwidth required for todays peripherals, even in the most maxed out possible configuration, you won't be able to saturate an x16 PCIe 3.0 link: * 1.2 GB/s 10Gb Ethernet * 3.0 GB/s 6 SATA ports * 9.6 GB/s 8 USB 3.1 ports * 0.2 GB/s Wifi 6 * 0.1 GB/s Audio
The Utopia concept allows for multiple mini-PCIe blocks, but you could simplify it and just make the case one big PCIe device that handles IO.
USB4 goes a bit beyond that, with each port using up to an x4 PCIe 3.0 link, so you might want have direct access to motherboard USB4 slots (especially since this allows exposing integrated graphics cards via alternate mode).
I hope one day to see the motherboard simplified to a plug-in card which holds CPU socket and RAM sockets, and exposes PCIe and M.2 slots for connectivity.
Sounds similar to S-100 and the old backplane-based computers of yore. We'll have come full circle!
You have a few major camera systems to work within, but aside from that variable, body, storage, mount, flash, lenses are modular and exchangeable in a very usable way.
When it comes to computing, most IO could be made readily modular, as PCIe is quite stable, and the bandwidth needs are easily exposed.
Where the problem comes, however, is making compute and RAM modular. Connecting multiple compute units with multiple RAM elements is a completely different problem than IO expansion, as the devices are much more sensitive to trace length and layout, and much higher bandwidth.
If the expected/desired Mac Pro is truly going to be fully modular, then I suspect it will have to be NUMA, and have a compute backplane separate from IO.
I'm imagining compute blocks that have RAM plugged directly to CPU that can be connected to the compute backplane (something like QPI, UPI, or InfinityFabric) that also has an IO block attached. One big problem is that these interconnects are proprietary, which means any IO unit plugged into that backplane will only be useful for that brand of processor.
The problem with this, however, is you lose access to CPU-exported PCIe bandwidth, which is very valuable (e.g. for GPU links). If you don't want to lose that, than you're back to a compute unit with one point of modularity, the RAM, a second point of modularity, PCIe/USB4, and a third point of modularity, CPU interconnect/backplane.
It's probably possible to deliver a design that enables this, but it's a very tough problem, and hasn't yet been solved.
I see you've never encountered a blacklisted lens vendor, or a lens that for whatever reason refuses to ID properly to the body and just throws up F-- and FEEE Errors all day long.