Next generation gpus

[idieorudie]

Could next generation gpus close the gap between desktop and mobile completely?

[KamiKatze]

Looking at the  - presumably - 300W TDP of the R9 390X: no, they can't.

[WereCat]

No.

While mobile is catching up slowly it will be a long time before they meet.

[minibois]

Excuse me?

You mean next gen PC GPU's will close the gap between ... Laptops and PC's or phones and PC's??

[idieorudie]

Looking at the - presumably - 300W TDP of the R9 390X: no, they can't.

But pascal looks promising

[idieorudie]

Excuse me?

You mean next gen PC GPU's will close the gap between ... Laptops and PC's or phones and PC's??

Laptops and pcs

[CoolaxGaming]

But pascal looks promising

Yeah, when pascal will come with all its power bells and whistles, AMD and Nvidia will have a "flagship" Pascal/490x with more power consumption and performence.

[TheRetiredSlave]

But pascal looks promising

 

Yes, but processing strength is still largely bound by the amount of electrical power that you can push into a chip. Obviously the processing architecture is the most important factor, but it will always be the case that a 250W GPU will always outperform a 100W GPU of the same architecture.

 

Unless AMD and Nvidia decided that their desktop GPUs would have a maximum power consumption of ~100W, desktop GPUs will always be able to be bigger and more powerful. A desktop user wouldn't really care (very much) about having two 300W GPUs in their desktop, because they can always just slap in a bigger PSU and add in a watercooling system. While there are notebooks that have two 100W GPUs, those notebooks are always massive and unwieldy (GT80 Titan, anyone?).

[minibois]

Laptops and pcs

Kind of..

But that is just because PC GPU power has not been going up that fast and gaming laptop demand has been going up.

[D2ultima]

The closest laptops and desktops ever were was with the 680M and GTX 680 being released. 680Ms could be clocked up almost to 670s in power. When the 780Ms were released, the Titan was out and the 780s came out a bit later (if I'm remembering right), so even though I could clock a 780M to GTX 680/GTX 770 back then, there were cards that had closed the power gap by a solid margin.

 

GTX 980s and GTX 980Ms are also pretty far apart too. I think one reason is that Maxwell has power miser abilities where it actively adjusts voltage/active modules/etc, but under some extreme load, they can pull RIDICULOUS amounts of power. A friend of mine tripped a dual 300W brick setup with two 980Ms before; pulled 625W straight (after conversion) and tripped the whole thing. In the same breath, his 780Ms in the same machine with +305MHz core OCs (yes, you read that right) and +250MHz (1000MHz effective) memory OCs never crossed 525W draw.

 

Maxwell has a lot of nice tricks, and it's definitely no trick how cool the bloody thing is, but it's far from being an actual fully efficient deal. Maybe Pascal or Volta will be able to truly close the gap as power draw can be reduced and such with higher grade silicon, but I think the main thing is the power draw, rather than the heat.

 

If laptop power bricks evolve to be self-cooled (not needing fans) and can pump say 600-700W into the size of the 330W ones we have right now, we'll be awesome. If Maxwell's coolness is any indication of things, larger GPU dies might be feasbile in large gaming notebooks too.

 

Of course, to supplement this, we'd need better batteries, or those GPUs would never be able to clock up on battery. And while gaming on battery is a terrible idea, the fact still remains quite a lot of these notebooks manage 2+ hours on battery right now, sometimes up to 4 hours or more if they have optimus, and there are a few things that require a clocked-up GPU like hardware acceleration on websites etc.

 

So, checklist:

Better power bricks.

Cool-as-maxwell-or-cooler

Better power frugality without using power conservation "tricks" (so that in the event that it has to be used full bore, it will not simply start pulling 600W or something on its own)

Better batteries

The market to stop fucking chasing 1" thick notebooks to run BF4 on ultra at 4K at 60 fucking degrees while having silent fans BECAUSE IT AIN'T HAPPENING FOR THE NEXT 10 YEARS

Intel to stop being idiots and allow MQ chips back on the market so that we can actually get them to run at stock, far less if we decide to overclock them