Uh. What? It's a balancing act. So yes I am aware.
Increasing the size of the chip by adding more CU's directly increases power consumption as every single transistor you add requires energy.

There is a reason why nVidia with Pascal decided not to blow out transistor counts and instead focused on driving the clockrates of it's chips up.
It was what offered the best performance/power consumption for a given chip size.

At 7nm (I hate using that term, because it's not a real 7nm process) you can use the extra TDP to drive up clock rates. (Provided you have the appropriate layout, transistor types etc'.)

Why not?

There are Pascal chips that boost to 2ghz at 14nm. And that is before overclocking.

Even Pascals base clock is only around 1400Mhz, far from the 1800 I was talking about. It's a big step up from Maxwells 1000 Mhz, but not as huge as you make it out to be. 

They can clock faster, but the TDP is going up accordingly. This includes 2Ghz Models, just check their actual Power consumption. Hint: It's north of 300W in case of a 1080 (non-Ti)

And in case you didn't get it yet, GCN was never meant for such high clock speeds. Vega is mostly clocked too high for it's own good to limit the distance between themselves and NVidia. It's the only way they could do it due to the hard limit of 64 CU with Vega.  As a result the power consumption explodes. A Vega at 1200Mhz consumes much less than it does at 1400Mhz, where most consumer cards are clocked at. The Vega in the Ryzen APU is clocked less agressively and as a result, consumes much less power

The Xbox One X is using an older Polaris derived part.
As someone who has a Polaris GPU and the Xbox One X I can assure you they are both inefficient, slow, mid-range hardware.

I mean shit... Neither have draw stream rasterization, primitive shaders or rapid packed math... Graphics Core Next in the console is simply slow, old and inefficient, The Xbox One X is no exception. - It is not overtly difficult to make big performance gains.
Heck AMD haven't even enabled draw stream rasterization in it's drivers and relegated primitive shaders for something for developers to opt-into via an API with Vega, those are efficiency gains going to waste.

Fact is... 64 CU's are enough for next gen, with ample clock rate and architectural refinement.

If Vega would be much faster than Polaris at same clock speed, I would agree. But a simulated Polaris at same clock speed is just marginally slower than Vega (though less powerhungry). There's a big reason why Vega is considered so disappointing.

False.
I suggest you look at this layout.


Oh ffs, that's a block Diagramm, not a layout!

And even then: You can see the L2 Cache, where do you think the L1 caches are? Yep, that's right: In the Compute Units. And the Graphics Pipeline in that diagramm is just the Front-end of a Compute Unit. What's marked with NCU are the cores of each Compute Units. 

Isn't the case that more CU would give you more connections and thusfore more bandwidth?

Even Pascals base clock is only around 1400Mhz, far from the 1800 I was talking about. It's a big step up from Maxwells 1000 Mhz, but not as huge as you make it out to be.

And even then: You can see the L2 Cache, where do you think the L1 caches are? Yep, that's right: In the Compute Units. And the Graphics Pipeline in that diagramm is just the Front-end of a Compute Unit. What's marked with NCU are the cores of each Compute Units.

Not always. Because the CU's themselves aren't tied to the actual ROP's.
Vega 56 and Vega 64 have the same amount of ROPS, despite having different CU counts... The only reason why Vega 56 despite having less CU's has lower bandwidth is because of it's lower memory clock.

Please use the quoting system properly. Otherwise I will not bother to reply in future.

And 1400mhz isn't a big step up from 1000mhz? 40% isn't a big step up? Seriously? This is in conjunction with more transistors as well?

1632mhz base on some 1080Ti's, but they spend the bulk of their time at a much higher clock rate.
Which is a 63% minimum increase over the 980Ti.

Not always. You see Transistors have an efficiency curve, once you hit the right voltage, with the right frequency you get an optimal amount of performance per watt. It's a very simple concept.

The 1080Ti has a TDP of 250w, the 980Ti has a TDP of 250w.
Actual power consumption hasn't blown out like you imply either.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/11180/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-ti-review/16

That is not insignificant.

Graphics Core Next is an extremely modular design.
AMD took GCN and touched it up to clock higher with Vega, AMD actually spent the bulk of it's extra transistor budget over Fiji to achieving that, thus it was designed for high clock speeds.
But don't take my word for it: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11717/the-amd-radeon-rx-vega-64-and-56-review/2

I have already touched on prior in this thread on why Vega is inefficient. It's not due to just the clock rates.
The entire Graphics Core Next architecture is inefficient regardless of clock or product segment.

Fact of the matter is... GPU's like Pascal are doing tile based rasterization, GCN isn't.
Again, don't take my word for it:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/10536/nvidia-maxwell-tile-rasterization-analysis
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/amd-vega-hardware-reviews.60246/page-59#post-1997699
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/amd-vega-hardware-reviews.60246/page-45#post-1995903

Correct. But the purpose of the block Diagram is to show which units are paired with what in a graphical layout.

There is more than just L1 caches.
The rest is just a rehash of crap I already know.

Pemalite said: 

(Remember, consoles cannot afford high-end hardware!)

To a degree I guess. We are not talking about Nintendo, also Xbox One shows that power matters. I think the next gen will be a 180 turn in console philosophy, but we shall see.

Understood. But let's say that if you increase the number of CUs it also makes senso to increase bandwidth to feed them right? Or would you say design would chose more CUs just to cut down the clockrate and consumption but keep the same general processing capacity?

To a degree I guess. We are not talking about Nintendo, also Xbox One shows that power matters. I think the next gen will be a 180 turn in console philosophy, but we shall see.

1.I doubt Sony will go all in on an expensive, but extreamly capable PS5. Remember what happened with PS3.

2.Ultimately I would love it if next gen could start with multiple teirs and form factors. Seeing a $400 1080p entry level PS5 Home Console, a $600 PS5 Phone, and an $800 PS5 4K model would would be awesome.

The Xbox One X isn't even using remotely high-end hardware.

I doubt Sony will go all in on an expensive, but extreamly capable PS5. Remember what happened with PS3. I would love to believe times have changed, and people would embrace a console that delivers an unprecedented power to price ratio. But, after Sony tried giving us an $800 PS3 for $500, and seeing it nearly destroy their brand, I just don't have faith in consumers.