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Early April’s Fool?

When thinking about GPU, one has only one thing in mind. When does the
next generation GPU come out and how will it outwit it’s predecessors?
According to some ideas of the EU, GPU classes determine how much power
they’re allowed to consume. There are seven classes of GPUs.

Classified as G7 GPU, the current Kepler and Tahiti GPUs are real power monsters when they’re teased with the newest games and benchmarks.

The AMD 7990 for example requires 3(!) PEG-8-pin connectors meaning that this bastard  is possible to suck out 525 Watts maximum of your wall outlet. Speaking of that: The first GeForce graphics cards were real power savers and it was much when a graphics card was demanding more then 20 Watts.

But todays games are more complex, more realistic and thus demanding for more and more GPU calculation power.  Additionally, programmers have licked blood when it comes to single-precision floating-point calculation power. While CPUs these days offer you about 200 GFlops/s, the 7990 for example maxes out at 3.8 TFlops/s (almost 15 times faster as a 8-core Intel Core i7!). So more and more applications also offer the usage of the GPU for CPU-intensive operations like videocoding or hash calculations.

But if it’s true, then the EU is about to limit this race sooner or later.

As the G7 category is currently for GPUs that can handle 128 GB/s of memory bandwith and have no capping atm, there are almost no limits for the speed of the GPU (except thermal and electric design, that is!). The 7970 for example scratches the 300 GB/s mark when overclocked.

So what’s about a fully-grown 7990 GPU then when it has access to two dedicated memory pools (which ain’t so trivial anyways)? Then it may reach speed beyound the 400 GB/s spot?

Of course this is just theoretical as there’s also the chipset, memory, CPU and the board itself playing an important rule in this game. But who knows what the next-gen boards have to offer?

The EU plans to cap new G7 GPUs to a mere 320 GB/s – (for you MHz freaks: using 512bit at 5GHz or 384bit at 6.67GHz) – And believe me… we’re not too far away fron this cap anymore. The 7990 for example licks the 6GHz spot already…

While there’s no top limit for Desktop GPUs, the notebook GPUs are already capped and are not allowed to produce more then 225 GB/s memory throughput.

According to this, next-gen GPUs are already affected if the EU plans to set this GPU classification capping at the beginning of 2014.

A hot beast, the AMD 7990 dual-GPU graphics card!


October 15, 2012 Netspark - 1600 posts - Member since: May 9th, 2011 No Comments »

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