> One interesting observation I made is that usually mainstream midrange cards seem to hover just over 200mm². That includes for example cards like the HD 7850,

> One interesting observation I made is that usually mainstream midrange cards seem to hover just over 200mm². That includes for example cards like the HD 7850, but extends all the way to the likes of the RX 580, RX 5700 XT, but also the GTX 1060 or GTX 660. Those cards are all 256 bit if AMD and 192 bit otherwise, funnily enough. this is indeed an interesting observation btw, and I have mused before that it's interesting how NVIDIA leans towards narrower buses with more advanced tech while AMD tends to lean towards plainer wider buses. Which is sort of the same observation but from the other direction. by that I mean, they were first to lean into (lossless) delta compression, and continued to retain an advantage in compression ratio for most subsequent generations. They were first to lean into quad-data rate with GDDR5X, first to lean into PAM4 with GDDR6X, etc. They very clearly favor narrower buses with higher "intensity" for their high-end stuff. Supposedly this reduces the power-per-bit-transfered but man looking at GDDR6X I really don't know, 3070 Ti is massively worse at efficiency than the 3070. Evidently they don't clock down the memory very well and at full transfer rate the total power is significantly higher (even if the per-bit is less). I wonder when we'll see the return of consumer HBM cards. It feels like the time has to be approaching soon, especially with high-NA reticle limit hitting in a gen or two. Memory PHYs are an obvious thing to cut back on for NVIDIA in particular, since they don't have MCM yet. the analogy also applies to high-end where NVIDIA is usually topping out at 384 and AMD has gone as high as 512b before. I think this is no longer possible with GDDR6/6X due to signal integrity/routing and the pcie card dimensions, everyone is topping out at 384b now, even AMD.