
















Final clock frequencies will likely remain estimates until later this month.

Comments     Threshold


Power Consumption
By AninParadX on 2/17/2007 1:21:38 AM , Rating: 2
Personally I think the X2900 is a great chip. I just read on other news site that the OEM version uses 270 W (max) and the consumer version around 240 W (max). I am just a little bit afraid that consumers won't be happy with so much power consumption. I am a bit concerned if this will set a new trend in the grapics sector. Intel and AMD are trying to lower the power consumption and the grapic cards are using up more and more power. Where will this end? Damn now I sound like a doomsday prophet ;)

RE: Power Consumption
By coldpower27 on 2/17/2007 5:11:51 AM , Rating: 2
You also has to keep in mind die sizes have been increasing over the past few generations, and a process is usually only cooler if you run it these days at around the same clock frequencies and around the same die size.

The reason why Intel and AMD have been trying to lower power consumption is that their die size levels haven't seen too much fluctuation in the past few years on the mainstream front, were talking about 80-150mm2 for mainstream SKU's. Not to mention the higher die sizes were mostly large cache parts which aren't too power hungry to begin with as cache doesn't suck a ton of juice.

It's very hard to lower power consumption, when all the power reducing effects of a process have been used to increase the amount of transistors on the card.

Look at ATI, they used a newer 80nm, but it looks like any power reducing effects were countered by the large increase in transistor count and the increase in clockspeeds over the prior generation. You can't have it all anymore something has got to give. GPU increase performance at a rate of 2x each significant generation through parallelism rather then clockspeed and that requires adding transistors which generate more heat and require more energy.

