“More power-hungry graphics cards are an inevitable trend”

The Three Dragons of Intel, Nvidia, and AMD are ready for a fall packed with processors and graphics cards. Thus, a mixture of formal and informal information about what’s to come is constantly flowing, with higher performance levels and higher power outputs being popular topics. Two weeks ago, AMD announced that the Radeon RX 7000 series and RDNA 3 will be one ChipletThe date that comes with up to 50 percent higher energy efficiency.

Now it turns out that it is not synonymous with less energy-intensive products. that it Tom’s devices who interviewed AMD’s Sam Naffziger, who among other things is responsible for decisions about the balance between performance and energy efficiency. Tom’s Hardware is curious what this balance looks like with RDNA 3, and Naffziger dances around the immediate issue by highlighting the current state of the art on technology and performance.

It’s really the fundamentals of physics that drive this. The demand for gaming and computing performance, if anything, is only accelerating, and at the same time, the underlying process technology is slowing dramatically — and the rate of improvement is. So energy levels will continue to rise. Now, we have a multi-year roadmap of very significant efficiency improvements to offset this curve, but the trend is there. – Sam Navziger

Naffziger explains that the current trend of thirst is partly due to the fact that it has become increasingly difficult to improve efficiency with modern manufacturing technology. At the same time, the demand for performance rises significantly, which is why manufacturers choose to increase clock frequencies and performance. Furthermore, Naffziger explains that competition means graphics cards don’t always perform in the most energy-efficient way, where, for example, an RDNA 2 card with clock frequencies of 2.5 GHz consumes 40 percent more power at 1.2 instead of 1.0 volts . However, the company plans to keep energy production in check, but that does not mean that TDP levels will not change.

Performance is king, but even if our designs are more energy efficient, that doesn’t mean you’re not raising power levels if the competition is doing the same. It’s just that they’re going to have to pay them a lot higher than we’re going to. – Sam Navziger

Energy-efficient architectures give way to higher clock frequencies, and in order to achieve the highest possible performance, Naffziger believes companies must ramp up performance — and that’s what sells. Thus, it’s entirely possible that Nvidia’s “Ada Lovelace” and RDNA 3 are significantly more power efficient than their predecessors, but graphics cards still get higher TDP values. Thus Nvidia’s signed top reports in the 450-800W range should not be considered impossible, but whether AMD also touches the same levels is currently unknown.