These CPUs aren't consuming 250W all the time. Those are peak numbers.
Both Intel and AMD are providing huge efficiency gains, too. Rumors show the new i7 13700T Raptor Lake part can have a 35W mobile TDP and still outperform a Ryzen 7 5800X: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-13700t-raptor-lake-a...
Speed scales nonlinearly with power. These high TDP parts are halo parts meant for enthusiast builds where it doesn't matter that the machine draws a lot of power for an hour or two of gaming.
It's also trivially easy to turn down the maximum power limit in the BIOS if that's what someone wants. The power consumption isn't a fixed feature of the CPU. It's a performance/power tradeoff that can be adjusted at use time.
I guess I could imagine a few threads for managing different 'panes', a thread for chat, a thread for audio maybe? It's hard to think of 24 independent units of work.
I'm not a game dev, just used to play PoE and curious.
Maybe with these frameworks threads are less dedicated and instead are more cooperative, idk. Really not my area!
This was back in the Windows XP days when I was working on OpenGL and DirectX. It would do this while rendering like a couple of triangles. One core I could understand, but not all. I'm pretty sure the driver had some spinlocks in there.
I also managed to find out the NVIDIA driver assumed user buffers passed to OpenGL (VBOs) would be 16-byte aligned, using aligned SIMD operations on them directly, even though there's no mention of alignment in the OpenGL spec.
It just so happened that Microsoft's C++ runtime would do 16-byte aligned allocations, while the language I was using only did 4-byte.
All is fair in love and performance wars I suppose...
The trade-off is that some number of frames of latency are now baked in by default, but if it means your game went from 30hz to 60hz with an frame of delay, it is about as responsive as it was before, but feels smoother.
U gotta pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers.
Don´t let the TDP of T-models fool you. Power consumption to reach boost clocks can peak up to 100W for T-models of the previous generation, and the 13700T probably needs to run close to that to outperform a 5800X.
But they require a heat-sink management designed for that peak. And it is insane. Try to keep microwave oven under 100C :-)
CPUs and GPUs keep getting hungrier and that is just not where we should be heading. I wish the perf increase didnt keep coming along consumption increase each gen.
As technologists, we should support manufacturers pushing the limit in power and performance. It helps drive overall efficiency and move technology forward.
1070 vs 3070 is +52٪ average (145 vs 220w) and +66% (154 vs 250w) sustained.
2070 vs 3070 is +10% (195) or +24% (203) sustained.
Even the 3060 you defend draws power as older flagships and 500w arent enough even for mainstream gaming.
And it keeps getting worse both on gpu and cpu size.
We aren't technologists but consumers, and reality is that x86 and gpus are in near duopolys so the 3 companies involved have little reasons to do a better job and it's clear Apple socs or more and more cloud moving into arm have not been enough of wake up calls.
In fact, the 3070 is significantly more power efficient than the 1070 is. Because while yes power is up 50%, performance is up 100%. So performance per watt has continued to improve even as power consumption has also increased.
The reality of power consumption is that it's the main lever to pull right now to deliver generational gains. It's the same lever Apple pulled for the M2 even.
> more and more cloud moving into arm have not been enough of wake up calls.
You mean the ARM enterprise SoCs that use just as much power as x86 does to deliver on average worse performance?
Electricity needs of an average household in western world are going to increase a lot in coming decades, with transition to more electric heating, cooking, cars, etc. Gaming machine power usage is minuscule compared to those.
Back of the envelope calculation here:
Assuming an average oven consumes 2kWh, and a CPU 0.1kWh:
Oven for four hours (average weekly usage) would be 2 * 4 = 8kWh weekly.
CPU for 24 hours, 7 days a week = 0.1 * 24 * 7 = 16.8kWh weekly.
While most house electronics keep pushing to consume less, computers go in the opposite direction.
This also adds tons of heat in my laptops or the air.
Working or gaming in a small room during hot days is painful.
Even consoles making noises of a turbo jet are nowadays considered normal. It's a disaster.
If some of Nvidia's next generation 4xxx series GPUs are close to 1000w draw as many rumors suggest, the total draw of a high spec Intel/Nvidia system is going to probably have similar running costs to an electric space heater when playing demanding games. The existing 3090ti is already a 500w part, which not so long ago was enough to power a whole system in addition to the GPU.
Now I am all for being green but there are things in my household that are much more of a concern than this.
Huge datacenters full of these chips is one thing. A personal computer for hacking & gaming probably not such a big deal.
Have you run the calculation? It's worthwhile configuring suspend for PCs these days. My 3090 never seems to go below 120W, for one thing.
My power is some of the cheapest in the country and we pay ~13 cents/kWh. It's a little misleading though since my bill breaks out generation and distribution costs into separate line items. They are both billed per kWH though and add up to 13 cents.
I wasn't trying to be misleading though because the point is the basic charge does not increase with usage. So for each additional kWh we add to that it's only $0.089/kWh.
500W is a very high average power consumption. And my electricity is 0.13 USD/kWh, which is about half 0.25 CHF/kWh.
True average power is probably below 100W, for a total cost in the realm of 10 CHF or USD per month.
If you’re living in a colder state, you may have to subtract the costs of having lower heating costs.
Also, consuming more energy is bad and this rush to apologize lack of innovation in gpu and cpus weve seen in the last decade is ridiculous.
Where does it end? I'm okay with a 5000cc truck because airplanes and cruise ships are much worse?
If you don't want to drive a 5l truck, don't drive one, but 500W is not an average load, and if you have high electricity costs thats a you problem not an everyone else problem.
The largest parts of my electrical bill are distribution and overhead charges that don't change whether I use power or not. The marginal utility of the power vs the cost is quite reasonable.
The performance gains are non existent and largely driven by bigger and bigger chips on smaller nodes.
There is no innovation in gpu and x86 cpus space since a long time, that happens only on arm nowadays.
Each of the last 4 generations of mid to high-end card from Nvidia has required more electricity than the last. By Nvidia's own admission, their future chips will get larger and hotter to some extent due to slow down in moore's law and future process nodes being harder to reach. The die size of the parts has also grown which does not help.
Its not a small trajectory either; 4 years ago the most power hungry consumer part from Nvidia was a 1080ti which would easily draw 250w under load. today that number is now 500w for the current 3090ti, and rumored to be 800-1000 for the 4xxx parts launching end of this year. A GPU often will sit at peak draw for hours at a time in games as they try to push as many FPS as possible.
A current gaming machine with recent components can easily exceed 500w constant load during gameplay, and this figure will rise again with the 4xxx parts.
The ONLY exception to this really is Apple devices, and even then its not clear we can compare an M1/M2 GPU to the fastest parts Nvidia offer.
Oh boy, you should visit USA sometime. A 5 liter truck is the small one.
Who is running their computer at 500W 24/7 ?
No modern PC should be pulling 500W all the time.
Idle power can be as low as 20-30W depending on the build.
You should also allow it to sleep, of course.
> My 3090 never seems to go below 120W, for one thing.
Something is wrong. A 3090 should only pull about 20 Watts at idle: https://www.servethehome.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3090-review-... . You might have some process forcing it into full-speed 3D mode for some reason.
Your example is in now representative of reality.
sucks if you run an AC though :)
I'm from southern italy, it's hot, you sweat, you don't need to burn gas, coal or build infrastructure so people waste it to cool their room, this is so entitled and no wonder we're in full climate crisis.
People can't give up on anything really. It gets worse everyday and people's remedy is to make it even worse,. Nonsense.
So yes, it makes things much worse with a hot pc in the room.
Sounds like a route to being penny-wise and pound-foolish. If you cut cheap entertainment you may well end up spending more (because in practice it's very hard to just sit in a room doing nothing), and if your gaming costs are a lot smaller than your energy bills then the cost should be relatively insignificant, almost by definition.
I hope you make a lot more per hour of work. Stop worrying about that.
This power draw is getting out of hand on desktop, consoles and x86 laptops and is largely a symptom of lack of competition and lack of technological advances.
By any reasonable measure they're not. £1 for "a few hours" of fun is a very cheap hobby.
So yes, I can "easily" afford it, but it doesn't mean that the energy consumption of my gaming rig hasn't affected how I think about it. Any future hardware upgrades will also be impacted by this - there is no way I'm buying a GPU with 500W TDP, even if again, I can afford the energy bills.
Those rumors are for millisecond long transient spikes, not an average of anything. So basically the rumor is a 500w peak load. Just like how the current 350-400w GPUs have transient spikes to upwards of 800w. It's not a problem in terms of power consumption (although obviously the increase from 400w to 500w would be), rather it's an issue with over-current protection in power supplies tripping. It's a "need bigger capacitors" type problem.
Not yet!
It adds up, especially in data centers where you end up needing even more megawatts of power and cooling capacity.
It is a few years old, though, so maybe by now quality standards have improved even for those kinds of cheapo-meters…
You probably want a UPS anyway if you've got a power guzzling (and thus presumably expensive) machine.
My standard dev machine is ~1kW flat out, ~500W most of the time, probably 100W idle. Runs for about eight hours a day. Say 500W is the average, suggests 4kW/hr a day. That's about $2 a day in the UK.
(those power numbers are relatively high - it's an elderly threadripper with two GPUs)