lowrider_05:

Haha very funny, he talks about Nvidia needing 1.2V for high clocks and AMD not needing that. But why then is my 6900XT running at 1.2V out of the box!?o_O

0blivious:

The summertime heat generation alone will keep me from ever considering this new era of simply not giving a crap about efficiency on high end cards. On that front, how are they planning to cool these power hungry beasts? AIO kits on all of them?

0blivious:

Sure, enthusiasts will water cool them, but not everyone has the skill/inclination to do that. I'm just curious what the out of the box solution will be from the OEMs.

asturur:

isn't the current that has a quadratic effect on consumption?

We’ve driven the frequency up, and that is something unique to AMD. Our GPU frequencies are 2.5 GHz plus now, which is hitting levels not before achieved. It’s not that the process technology is that much faster, but we’ve systematically gone through the design, re-architected the critical paths at a low level, the things that get in the way of high frequency, and done that in a power-efficient way. Frequency tends to have a reputation of resulting in high power. But in reality, if it’s done right, and we just re-architect the paths to reduce the levels of logic required, without adding a bunch of huge gates and extra pipe stages and such, we can get the work done faster. If you know what drives power consumption in silicon processors, it’s voltage. That’s a quadratic effect on power. To hit 2.5 GHz, Nvidia could do that, and in fact they do it with overclocked parts, but that drives the voltage up to very high levels, 1.2 or 1.3 volts. That’s a squared impact on power. Whereas we achieve those high frequencies at modest voltages and do so much more efficiently. We analyze our design pre-silicon, as we’re in the process of developing it, to assess that efficiency. We absolutely analyzed heavily the Nvidia designs and what they were doing, and of course targeted doing much better. Sam Naffziger

pegasus1:

Id have to check my 6900xt but im pretty sure i hit 2.6ghz on a fair bit less than 1.2v

cucaulay malkin:

are they really stupid ? 1.175v for 2500mhz https://tpucdn.com/review/amd-radeon-rx-6900-xt/images/clock-vs-voltage.png

lowrider_05:

Haha very funny, he talks about Nvidia needing 1.2V for high clocks and AMD not needing that. But why then is my 6900XT running at 1.2V out of the box!?o_O

schmidtbag:

It's nice to see the lack of people here saying "who cares? Electricity is cheap" and "so what if it uses a lot of power if it has better performance-per-watt?". Seems like they're finally understanding the underlying problems. There is hope yet that AMD and Nvidia will take the hint that this is an unreasonable and petty way to achieve top performance. The prices and power draw of GPUs are rapidly killing interest in PC gaming. Miners and scalpers contribute a lot toward this but we can't blame them entirely.