NVIDIA and AMD’s next-generation flagship graphics cards, which are expected to leverage the Lovelace and RDNA 3 architectures, respectively, could be more power hungry than anyone might have imagined. This is according to the latest rumors from prominent leakers such as kopite7kimi, who recently commented on speculation about NVIDIA’s flagship GeForce RTX 40 Series products featuring a TDP of at least 400 watts. While that specification already exceeds the GeForce RTX 3090’s 350-watt TDP by a notable amount, kopite7kimi suggested that the TDP for the flagship models will go even higher, stating that “400 is not enough.” As for AMD, Beyond3D forum member and alleged insider Bondrewd recently shut down speculation that Navi 31 could draw as much as 500 watts. That prompted 3DCenter.org to seek out a more probable estimate by looking into the supposed size of the GPU and its components, which led to a potential TBP of 420 to 450 watts.
| AMD Navi 31 | NVIDIA AD102 | |
|---|---|---|
| Chip | TSMC 5nm, MCM, total probably ~ 800mm² (or more) | TSMC 5nm, monolithic, probably ~ 600mm² |
| Hardware | 6 SE, 60 WGP, 15’360 FP32, Infinity Cache, 256 bit GDDR6 | 12 RE, 144 SM, 18’432 FP32, 384 bit GDDR6X |
| Power Consumption | probably in the direction of 450-480 watts | probably in the direction of 420-450 watts |
400 is not enough
— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) July 29, 2021
This is not entirely surprising, because the graphics chip developers are fighting against two effects: On the one hand, the advances in semiconductor production are not geared towards achieving a power consumption effect equal to the gain in space. If you use the area gain (fully), the result is always a slightly higher power consumption – usually with a greater difference than what you could make up for by improving efficiency at the architecture level. And on the other hand, AMD & nVidia are approaching the 5nm generation, as is well known, with violent hardware jumps – which are generally impossible to achieve with the same power consumption.
Sources: kopite7kimi, Bondrewd (via 3DCenter.org)