Why are GPUs so big, while CPUs are so small?
In: Engineering
Honestly it comes down to marketing. Consumer gpus have massively overbuilt coolers that can be used to differentiate brands when the core of the product, the silicon die, is nearly identical. Brands will also try to overbuild the cooler such that they can use it up and down the product stack. It is cheaper, in most cases, to reuse the same cooler on multiple cards rather than have multiple assembly lines. Professional gpus use the same dies at similar TDPs, something like the 4090 vs the ada RTX 5000, use dual slot coolers while being identical in performance.
EDIT: Thought you were more talking about the coolers than the card itself. As for the form factor, graphics cards also have memory and power management circuitry that is usually built onto the the motherboard. That is why you see them more as add in cards. There are form factors in more specialized systems like SXM form factors. They are still bigger than say a server cpu but not by that much.
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