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This is a funny project. Too many people taking this serious, it is more of a 'can it be done' because the physical interfaces suggest that it should be possibl
by jacquesm 10mo ago
This is a funny project. Too many people taking this serious, it is more of a 'can it be done' because the physical interfaces suggest that it should be possible, and then to follow through on it to prove that yes it actually can be done. And tbh much better than I expected it to work. I can imagine that for GPU compute heavy and interconnect bandwidth constrained applications a combination like this might actually be useful. You essentially just added an ethernet port to a 5090, there must be some value in that.
- scottjg 10mo agoi thought my post was already too long to include this, but to your point, you can run AI inference in this setup and the performance can be pretty good.
- colechristensen 10mo agoYeah it is obviously actually useful for AI inference over which the pcie speed isn't particularly important and a single board computer gets you a small system.
- geerlingguy 10mo agoThere are definitely some use cases where it works out, others where it doesn't; I spent a bit of time testing that side of things late last year: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/big-gpus-dont-need-big-pcs/ https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/big-gpus-dont-need-bi...
- scottjg 10mo agoa great post that definitely inspired this one. i link to it in the first paragraph of my blog post.
- geerlingguy 10mo agoI feel like maybe by the end of this year someone with access to a bunch of RTX Pro 6000s will have them running on a Pi or RK3588 lol.
- scottjg 10mo agowe can only hope
- shmeeed 10mo agoI appreciate you making the post not about AI.
- AceJohnny2 10mo agoit's extra funny to me because the Raspberry Pi SoC is basically a little CPU riding on a big GPU (well, the earlier ones were. Maybe the latest ones shift the balance of power a bit). In fact, to this day the GPU is still the one driving the boot sequence. So plugging a RasPi into a 5090 is "just" swapping the horse for one 10,000x bigger (someone correct my ratio of the RasPi5 GPU to the RTX5090)
- ollien 10mo agoI'm not very familiar with this layer of things; what does it mean for a GPU to drive a boot sequence? Is there something massively parallel that is well suited for the GPU?
- baby_souffle 10mo ago> what does it mean for a GPU to drive a boot sequence It's a quirk of the broadcom chips that the rpi family uses; the GPU is the first bit of silicon to power up and do things. The GPU specifically is a bit unusual, but the general idea of "smaller thing does initial bring up, then powers up $main_cpu" is not unusual once $main_cpu is ~ powerful enough to run linux.
- throwaway894345 10mo agoThat’s interesting, particularly since as far as I can tell, nothing in userland really bothers to make use of its GPU. I would really like to understand why, since I have a whole bunch of Pi’s and it seems like their GPUs can’t be used for much of anything (not really much for transcoding nor for AI).
- KurSix 10mo agoSeeing real games and benchmarks makes it more than a party trick, even if the use cases are niche. The serious takes kind of miss that the point is to poke the stack and see where it breaks