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I'm sure that for gaming, power is not an issue, but I will continue to lament that Intel and Nvidia do not give a shit about making power-efficient designs. Th

I'm sure that for gaming, power is not an issue, but I will continue to lament that Intel and Nvidia do not give a shit about making power-efficient designs. They push the increased cost and headaches to consumers and OEMs who need to spend time and money cooling their computers. Maybe that's the genius of their plan? The chip designers continue to put out better & hotter processors and expect someone else to figure out cooling. Thermal design failures are not attributed to Intel and Nvidia, instead to OEMs and consumers.

perryizgr8 4y ago
I don't understand. If you are unable to cool it properly, you can under-clock it, or run less intensive programs on it, or just get a last gen card. Offering a more powerful GPU/CPU for people and use-cases that demand it is not a problem. Most games these days run well even on mid-tier cards of the 20 series, that's two generations ago. So people have all the choice in the world. Just because a 1000 bhp LaFerrari exists in the market, doesn't mean you cannot buy a ~100 bhp Corolla. People who buy the Ferrari will need to take special care of their car to get the most out of it. That's a pleasure in itself for some.
- guhidalg 4y ago
  Your car analogy is missing the fuel aspect. If I can get 1000HP with 50MPG, instead of 1000HP at 5MPG, I would buy a Ferrari. At the high-end, Nvidia is making more powerful cards (HP) with the same fuel efficiency as before. Maybe they are making more efficient cards at the lower end but those don’t get attention on HN it seems.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    > At the high-end, Nvidia is making more powerful cards (HP) with the same fuel efficiency as before. No, perf/w is still climbing every generation. It'll climb hugely this generation too. NVIDIA's marketing number is 2x perf at the same wattage as last gen, obviously needs to be validated by third party testing but they're shrinking two nodes at once here, it's a bigger node jump than Pascal was. People have been primed to react negatively by a couple of twitter rumormongers like kopite7kimi. Yeah 4090 has a high TGP, but it's more like 400W TGP (450W TBP) and not the 800W TGP / 900W TBP that he was shouting from the rooftops about. There is still a huge gain in efficiency here, it's just also a very large (and expensive) chip on top of the higher efficiency. But people don’t discard their incorrect mental frames when the information used to build them is falsified. Actually they just tend to retrench and dig deeper (“450W is still too much even if it is 2x perf/w!”). Ada is a power hog, “everybody knows it”. https://videocardz.com/newz/flagship-nvidia-ada-sku-might-feature-18176-cores-48gb-memory-and-800w-tdp https://videocardz.com/newz/flagship-nvidia-ada-sku-might-fe... People said they wanted a balls-out big chip on a competitive node, that's exactly what the 4090 is, it's highly efficient and very large, this is much closer to the cutting edge of what the tech can deliver than Samsung 8nm junk or little baby 450mm2 dies. Now people are complaining about the TDP and the cost, even if it's more efficient that's not good enough. Unfortunately the TDP is a matter of physics, thermal density is going up every generation and a big chip on a modern node pulls a lot of power. There are lower models in the stack too and those will maintain that efficiency benefit. It's a larger-than-pascal node shrink, efficiency is going up a lot here.
dotnet00 4y ago
Their lower more efficient tiers of hardware haven't just disappeared because the halo product emphasizes performance over efficiency.

perryizgr8 4y ago

I don't understand. If you are unable to cool it properly, you can under-clock it, or run less intensive programs on it, or just get a last gen card. Offering a more powerful GPU/CPU for people and use-cases that demand it is not a problem. Most games these days run well even on mid-tier cards of the 20 series, that's two generations ago. So people have all the choice in the world. Just because a 1000 bhp LaFerrari exists in the market, doesn't mean you cannot buy a ~100 bhp Corolla. People who buy the Ferrari will need to take special care of their car to get the most out of it. That's a pleasure in itself for some.

guhidalg 4y ago
Your car analogy is missing the fuel aspect. If I can get 1000HP with 50MPG, instead of 1000HP at 5MPG, I would buy a Ferrari. At the high-end, Nvidia is making more powerful cards (HP) with the same fuel efficiency as before. Maybe they are making more efficient cards at the lower end but those don’t get attention on HN it seems.
- paulmd 4y ago
  > At the high-end, Nvidia is making more powerful cards (HP) with the same fuel efficiency as before. No, perf/w is still climbing every generation. It'll climb hugely this generation too. NVIDIA's marketing number is 2x perf at the same wattage as last gen, obviously needs to be validated by third party testing but they're shrinking two nodes at once here, it's a bigger node jump than Pascal was. People have been primed to react negatively by a couple of twitter rumormongers like kopite7kimi. Yeah 4090 has a high TGP, but it's more like 400W TGP (450W TBP) and not the 800W TGP / 900W TBP that he was shouting from the rooftops about. There is still a huge gain in efficiency here, it's just also a very large (and expensive) chip on top of the higher efficiency. But people don’t discard their incorrect mental frames when the information used to build them is falsified. Actually they just tend to retrench and dig deeper (“450W is still too much even if it is 2x perf/w!”). Ada is a power hog, “everybody knows it”. https://videocardz.com/newz/flagship-nvidia-ada-sku-might-feature-18176-cores-48gb-memory-and-800w-tdp https://videocardz.com/newz/flagship-nvidia-ada-sku-might-fe... People said they wanted a balls-out big chip on a competitive node, that's exactly what the 4090 is, it's highly efficient and very large, this is much closer to the cutting edge of what the tech can deliver than Samsung 8nm junk or little baby 450mm2 dies. Now people are complaining about the TDP and the cost, even if it's more efficient that's not good enough. Unfortunately the TDP is a matter of physics, thermal density is going up every generation and a big chip on a modern node pulls a lot of power. There are lower models in the stack too and those will maintain that efficiency benefit. It's a larger-than-pascal node shrink, efficiency is going up a lot here.

dotnet00 4y ago

Their lower more efficient tiers of hardware haven't just disappeared because the halo product emphasizes performance over efficiency.