> I think this is part of why GPU power is skyrocketing and why Apple, Qualcomm, and the like are trying to shift towards services. IMHO it's only a very small

> I think this is part of why GPU power is skyrocketing and why Apple, Qualcomm, and the like are trying to shift towards services. IMHO it's only a very small part of why GPU power consumption is going up. The main reason is the completely unnecessary chase for the performance crown. From personal testing: my GPU manages to get 95% of its peak performance while being power limited to 80%. So the in order to squeeze the last 5% of performance out of the device, 20% more power is pushed through it. It stays above 99% peak performance while being power limited to ~87%. But even just looking at the raw numbers paints a different picture. About 12 years ago, a high-end GPU (e.g. GTX 480) had a power draw of 250W at a theoretical peak FP32 performance of 1,345 GFLOPS. This year's RTX 4070 has a theoretical peak performance of 29.15 TFOPS at 200W, so we went from 5.38 GFLOPS/W to 145.75 GFLOPS/W in 12 years - a 27x improvement in efficiency and a ~22x improvement in raw performance. Now let's compare that to the numbers from a decade ago: a GTX 580 from 2010 had a power rating of 244W at 49.41 GTexel/s. A Geforce2 Ultra from 2000 used about 10W at 2.0 GTexel/s. So we went from 0.2 GTexel/s/W to - you've guessed it - 0.2 GTexel/s/W, so same efficiency with a ~27x increase in performance over a decade, though the efficiency is only a guess, since neither GFLOPS nor official power draw figures are readily available for 2000-era hardware. Fast forward a few years so we can get reliable power draw numbers and comparable performance in GFLOPS, we have the high end GeForce 8800 GTX at 155W for 345.6 GFLOPS in 2006. Ten years later, the comparable model would have been the GTX 1080 from 2016 with 180W at 8.873 TFLOPS. So 2.2 GFLOPS/W versus 49.3 GFLOPS/W or a 22x increase in efficiency and a ~26x increase in performance over the course of a decade. So during the past 23 years, power efficiency steadily improved, while raw performance increase also showed no signs of slow down in the GPU space. This is given the same generous time frames, to account for the occasional generational leap.