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Energy Efficient Graphics Processors?
An anonymous reader asks: "The trends for graphics hardware these days seems to be to draw more power and create more heat to get faster processors and push more polygons. Yet in the CPU arena chips like the Via C3 and Epia, Transmeta Crusoe and Astro, Intel Pentium M, and IBM/Motorola PowerPC (G3-5) seem to favor more power per megahertz and cooler runnings without significant performance loss. Is this just because of the nature of the CPU versus GPU? I understand a GPU die is almost entirely reserved for calculation while the CPU is only 20% of so for calculation. Or are the graphics chip makers merely refusing to innovate and take routes that would reign in out of control energy consumption because of the race for more polygons? What kind of architectural changes could be implemented to alleviate graphics card power gluttony?"
The latest Pentiums are power hungry hogs too, if you want the latest and greatest it's going to be less effienct than it could be. Low power consumption, size of heat sinks, volume of fans are less of a design constraint that the raw power of the chip.
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Most versions of the Geforce FX 5200 (non-Ultra) run fanless, which should speak to its relative energy efficiency. It also runs about as fast as a Geforce 3, unfortunately.
For great justice.
You've compared high-end 3d desktop gamer cards which are excessive on heat and power to CPU chips which are designed for lower power low heat situations. The difference isn't nearly as pronounced with a more valid comparison on the CPU side, say a high end P4EE or Athlon64/Opteron. Also as you've stated, the GPUs are almost entirely dedicated to high-power processing, whereas the CPUs spend a lot of their silicon on other things. A high end GPU is generally superior to a high end CPU in terms of raw computing power. Therefore, it needs more power and makes more heat. If you forced intel or amd to build a CPU for you right now that had the raw compute potential of the latest high end cards, they'd have a hard time doing so without being just as hot and power hungry. All these things scale over time, but the demands of the user and his software scale up to meet it as well.
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No, but the GPU's he's talking about would fall into the same category as the P4's, which was my point..
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As gamer laptops get more popular, shouldn't we see new lower power GPUs with comparable muscle to the previous rev?
What's the power consumption like on a GPU that isn't doing much? Do they sleep like some CPUs can, or are they always going at full bore?
A few seconds on Google and I found nVidia's mobile offering. A few more seconds and I found this. Undoubtedly ATI has something similar.
Theoretically, the more physical cooling you can give a chip, the more energy it can suck up (i.e. the more heat it can disipate). If anything, having less room for cooling should force energy efficiency (so that they don't have to disipate as much heat).
The Opteron "HE" is classed at 55 watts (I suppose that is at 2.0 GHz or so)
The P4 extremely expensive edition dissipates 103 watts at 3.4 GHz.
So in comparison to other desktop processors it does fairly well. Now there are efficient G4 class processors coming from Motorola the MPC7447 is said to dissipate 10 watts at 1 GHz.
I am not comparing any of these processors GHz to GHz because we all know that is not an accurate method of comparison. But I think it wrong to classify the MPC7447 as a desktop processor or even a processor for a desktop replacement type laptop. But then again maybe it's because after using OS X on a G5 I'll never take Motorola seriously (for the desktop) again. That's not saying Motorola is a bad company or their chips are bad! I develop almost exclusively on them at work, but then again I am an embedded developer.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
One of the problems is that PCI and AGP boards are "upside down" compared to ISA boards. Think component-side versus solder-side. In the case of ISA and PCI boards, it's important not to exceed a certain width because of adjacent slots, but since the AGP slot is always the first one, an AGP board could extend pretty far in the other direction.
Why don't they simply mount the GPU to the other side of the board to allow a much larger heatsink? I think this is either a design tradition or a limitation of the pick-and-place assembly machines, because there's no technical reason not to. I suppose if taken to an extreme, it could lead to physical fit problems in certain cases, but let's not go that far.
I tried a no-name GeForce 4 MX440 a couple of years back, but the display quality was awful. It was so poor I had to downgrade to 1280x1024 on my 19" Trinitron screen. After a few months the card broke and I went back to my TNT2 Ultra (Creative Labs) and back up to 1600x1200.
I was thinking about getting something fanless and by nVidia since their (binary-only) drivers are superb on Linux (I don't do the idealogical zealotry as much nowadays).
High-performance 3D is nice when you need it, but nowadays stuff is so powerful for under $100 that there's not much point to buying something really expensive. Some of us want a crisp, high-resolution display, flicker-free (70Hz+) without a great big noisy fan.
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