3 ms·
It is. I remember when I bought my GTX 260. It was crazy how much power hungry it was at the time for a mid market card. I had to buy a drumroll 450W PSU. Years
by msk-lywenn 4y ago
It is. I remember when I bought my GTX 260. It was crazy how much power hungry it was at the time for a mid market card. I had to buy a drumroll 450W PSU. Years later, I upgraded to a GTX 960. At first I thought "I probably need an even bigger PSU now...". I was shocked and then very happy to learn that the GTX 960 consumed less than my 7 generations older GPU. They can do it right when they care.
- addaon 4y agoThe GTX 260 was build on a 65 nm process, the 960 on a 28 nm process. This is one and a half full nodes apart, on similar planar processes with a full node really was a doubling of density. While the transistor count increased by more than that (1.4B to 5.2B), leading to a larger die size, it can't be overstated how much the improved process and decreased Vth helped power usage in this era. It would have been a challenge to use more power across those processes.
- tails4e 4y agoBelieve me, chip designers care more about power now than they did then. Back in the larger process nodes when you moved to the next node the voltage scaled also, and as power is proportional to voltage squared, power went down. It was the ultimate free lunch, smaller, faster, lower power. That mostly ended around the 20nm node. Now designers work very hard to make things more power efficient, or stay within a thermal budget.