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Kynes on 29 August 2012
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Baron said:
Kynes said:
Baron said:
Kynes said:
Baron said:
40% of 50 Watts is 20 Watts. The 5570 is rated at 39. By your logic that means it can only be twice as powerful as the 2600 XT. Yet it delivers about 4 times the power of the 2600 XT. Newer tech = faster hardware.


Die size difference =! power consumption difference. There are other factors as more advanced transistors technologies as HKMG, for example. The difference is that we're talking here of chips made in the same process, there is not foundry advantage.

I know. In fact, halfing the die size rarely results in being able to deliver twice the power with the same tech.

As for the chips. The Wii U gpu will be based on an entirely different architecture than the Xenos or RSX. That's why I keep saying it's perfectly capable to deliver 3 or 4 times the power of the 360 or PS3 gpu. Just as the 5570 is perfectly capable of outperforming the 2600 XT even if it had the same maufacturing proces.

Using much more transistors and much more power if both were made on the same node. That's is the difference. 5570 use 627 million transistors. 2600 XT use 390 millions. That's why.

So you REALLY believe there's no difference in technology. Than arguing with you is pointless.


Of course there is a difference in technology, you can improve your graphics pipeline in the years between Xenos (2005) and RV770 (2008), but in your comparison between 2600 and 5570 there is also a huge difference in fabrication nodes and transistor count. You can't say "look, this graphics card is much faster than this other one and has similar power consumption", of course it is going to be a much improved graphics card, it's a three generations later card, with 60% more transistors, made in a much improved fabrication node. It would say horrible things of the AMD and TSMC engineers if the chip isn't faster.

Now compare two graphics chip made on the same process: 5870 and 6970. One has 2.15 billion transistors, the other 2.89 billions. 6970 has an improved technology on the VLIW4 design instead of VLIW5 design (ATI said their ALU usage was 3.8 on the VLIW5 design, so most of the time the 5th ALU was unused) and it consumed much more power, 188W versus 250W. 6970 should be much faster than 5870, right? No, 6970 is faster, but most of the time on the 10-15% ballpark. This is a valid comparison, two chips made on the same node, not your 65 vs 40nm comparison. It doesn't matter that PS3 and 360 were designed with 90nm on mind, they had huge power consumptions then, but they have shrunk their chips now, and power consumption is still high. WiiU can't have a huge power consumption with the size it has, and you know it.

This time WiiU won't have that advantage, as the chips of the three consoles will be made on the same node, so the transistor count and/or frequency won't be much higher than X360 and PS3 chips if they want to have power consumption controlled.