Legendary video game developer imagines a future where GPUs don’t need PCs — John Carmack envisions a GPU with Linux onboard, so you would just add power and a display

Earlier today, legendary video games developer John Carmack, the leader programmer for iconic titles such as Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein 3D, made the case for what one might casually describe as a standalone graphics card.

Imagine connecting a graphics card to a display and a power source and running diagnostics before installing it or running it standalone later when troubleshooting. Perhaps the card could have a compact Linux distro onboard, mused the iconic Doom developer. It could even come with a handful of apps and utilities and connect to a keyboard via DisplayPort…

Carmack was lamenting the passing of SLI graphics cards on Twitter/X when he went off on a tangent and shared his hopes that GPUs would one day be capable of operating without a host CPU.

“It would just be fun if GPUs made their own video signal with diagnostic information when you apply power outside of a host system,” the video games programming guru wrote. “You could go further and put a tiny Linux system running BusyBox on your command processor, and backchannel keyboard input through the display port if you don’t have a USB port.”

You can tell that the longer Carmack thought about putting an OS on a graphics card, the more he warmed to the idea. And the idea of a standalone computer based upon a graphics card isn’t such a surprising one to push forward in 2024.

It is already quite common for motherboards to be capable of basic functionality without a CPU, for example. Many motherboards have diagnostic lights and/or codes that work regardless of a CPU being present. Also, ‘BIOS Flashback’ is a great modern feature for updating the motherboard BIOS for unsupported new processors and doesn’t need a CPU installed to work. However, BIOS Flashback remains a displayless function in 2024, requiring a dedicated USB port and hardware button. Inevitably, it will develop and may gain display and further functionality.

Moving our focus back to the world of graphics cards, adding M.2 SSD storage to graphics cards seems to be a growing trend. Asus started this ball rolling not that long ago, and GPU-hosted storage was seemingly embraced most recently by Maxsun. A graphics card already has a fair chunk of RAM onboard, even Nvidia models and a modest general processor added to the mix would satisfy all the prerequisites of a classical computer. There are also graphics cards with built-in displays, so even this has already been integrated.

For some enthusiasts and gamers, the GPU is their PC’s single largest, most important, and most expensive component. It seems to be primarily because of this that a mini-PC meme is emerging, where users add a PC onto their graphics card rather than a GPU to their PC system. Perhaps that is our destiny, and Carmack predicted it today…