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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 makin

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.

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.