Mainstream GPU speculation 65nm - 55 - 40 - 32

Squilliam

Beyond3d isn't defined yet
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Since we spend so much time speculating on the high end chips, how about we all change the pace and talk about the chips like the RV730s which have to hang off the PCI-E bus and can only draw power from the motherboard. This is the area where most mainstream buyers get their cards from.

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Thats pretty much the best we can expect at the current process technology at present. So the real question could be, how will this segment evolve over time as AMD/Nvidia transistion to smaller process nodes?

This segment is interesting because there is a very clear and fixed limit in terms of power draw and heat output and it cannot exceed what the PCI-E bus can output. I just thought it would be interesting to speculate how the technology might evolve in a limited power/thermal window. 75W isn't a lot of power when considering the abilities of their thermally loose cousins but its like taking an interest in small cars, even if they aren't sexy it still takes a lot of effort to bring them to market in a form people would actually like to buy.
 
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when you idle your power consumption is all about your core clock and voltage
There's more to power consumption than clock and voltage though they obviously play a major role. Some other contributing factors are the clock tree in the chip and if the clock can shut off for parts of the chip or if it is always switching. This is a type of clock gating.

If your core clock is 1GHz yet much of the chip sees no clock during idle this part might have lower power consumption than a chip that broadcasts a 100MHz clock to the entire chip during idle.
 
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