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This thing guzzles up to 300 watts under load. There is no way this chip is not going to be throttled to death in a laptop form factor, unless the laptop itself

This thing guzzles up to 300 watts under load. There is no way this chip is not going to be throttled to death in a laptop form factor, unless the laptop itself makes more fan speed than a 747. I personally own a Gigabyte Brix Pro i7 and it gets hot and throttled as soon as you load the 8 cores, and this is a 65 watt TDP. Sure, this monster-chip-in-a-notebook pitch sounds great in the press release. It's not going to be a good piece of engineering. http://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-review/21 http://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-re...

kevingadd 11y ago
The 9xx series has pretty good power management. In practice even at 4k resolutions a 980 or 980ti will spend a lot of time running below 100% TDP. Also, those measurements in the anandtech article are total system power, not GPU power, which is why the idle measurement is in the 70w range. (Modern GPUs generally do not pull down 70w at idle.) One of the upsides to having a really high-spec GPU in a laptop is that as long as the power management is done properly, it can burst up to full speed to get you low latency for rendering and then drop back down to idle. In sustained rendering scenarios (like games) it may end up thermal/acoustic/power throttled, but that happens on desktops anyway - it will just throttle quicker and scale down a bit more.
- vegabook 11y ago
  Point taken on the total system power, but it's still 165 watt TDP. Agreed for "burst" workflows it'll be fine. But how many people have "burst" workflows that need a mobile 980? This thing is for gamers and they'll be maxing it for hours at a time, or (I personally) would be maxing it for GPU compute. I just think it's being done for publicity and that this is not really a serious use case for a chip like this. Indeed this whole "my chip number is bigger than yours" game is not seeing increases in real life performance because of aggressive throttling. I'm seeing lower-power chips beating throttled higher-power chips in small form factor computers. You know how merciless gamers can be. Nvidia better be sure that the systems sporting this chip can achieve 980-style expectations, because otherwise these guys will light up the forums with criticism.

kevingadd 11y ago

The 9xx series has pretty good power management. In practice even at 4k resolutions a 980 or 980ti will spend a lot of time running below 100% TDP. Also, those measurements in the anandtech article are total system power, not GPU power, which is why the idle measurement is in the 70w range. (Modern GPUs generally do not pull down 70w at idle.) One of the upsides to having a really high-spec GPU in a laptop is that as long as the power management is done properly, it can burst up to full speed to get you low latency for rendering and then drop back down to idle. In sustained rendering scenarios (like games) it may end up thermal/acoustic/power throttled, but that happens on desktops anyway - it will just throttle quicker and scale down a bit more.

vegabook 11y ago
Point taken on the total system power, but it's still 165 watt TDP. Agreed for "burst" workflows it'll be fine. But how many people have "burst" workflows that need a mobile 980? This thing is for gamers and they'll be maxing it for hours at a time, or (I personally) would be maxing it for GPU compute. I just think it's being done for publicity and that this is not really a serious use case for a chip like this. Indeed this whole "my chip number is bigger than yours" game is not seeing increases in real life performance because of aggressive throttling. I'm seeing lower-power chips beating throttled higher-power chips in small form factor computers. You know how merciless gamers can be. Nvidia better be sure that the systems sporting this chip can achieve 980-style expectations, because otherwise these guys will light up the forums with criticism.