Sam Naffziger, AMD Senior Vice President and Product Technology Architect, recently conducted an interview with VentureBeat in which he discussed various aspects of the company’s future. Among other things, he stated that AMD’s vision includes high-performance graphics cards with TDP of up to 700 watts by 2025… where has the quest for efficiency gone in the PC ecosystem?
In recent times, it seems that all graphics card manufacturers (and not just AMD) are “shooting down the middle street”, greatly increasing the performance of their devices but based on brute force, since it seems evident that the Consumption has exploded to limits that a couple of years ago we could not even imagine. In the past, having a source of 1000 or more watts in the PC was for very high-end systems, generally with several graphics cards, but it seems that for PCs of the future equipped with TOP hardware it will be the most normal.
Up to 700W TDP on AMD graphics
Sam Naffziger has been with AMD for 16 years now, and has been working in the graphics division since 2017. During the aforementioned interview, he said very interesting things about how the brand’s graphics efficiency has increased through improvements in the RDNA architecture , but then after releasing the pearl of 700 watts it seems that the search for efficiency has become a thing of the past.
Although this image that we have put above has not been a specific part of the interview, we can see a clear trend on how the industry is evolving with respect to the TDP of graphics cards (however, we are facing an official AMD slide ). Naffziger has talked about some of the innovative ways that AMD has prevented the TDP of its graphics cards from skyrocketing, and based on the interview it seems that the company has something ace up its sleeve for RDNA 3 and RDNA 4. the future doesn’t look too rosy in this regard.
According to this AMD official, “the doubling of performance and a 50% gain in performance per watt” is due in large part to the fact that they have managed to raise the operating frequency of the GPU to more than 2.5 GHz using values of fairly modest voltage. AMD also opted to reduce the width of the bus and to use large amounts of cache memory, but again we enter the dynamic of having to contrast this statement with that TDP of 700 watts that is predicted.
Face it: you’ll need to switch fonts for your next PC
What seems clear at this point is that if you want to update your PC with one of the new next-generation graphics cards (either AMD or NVIDIA), you’re going to need to change your power supply, and not just because of the controversial PCIe connectors. that will be necessary, but also because the consumption of graphics cards has skyrocketed and almost all of us will need to change the source simply to be able to have a more powerful one.
We’ll see, in any case, how things turn out, since at this moment we can only work with the data that the manufacturers are telling us “by lip service”. We will have to wait for the new generations of graphics cards to hit the market (expected by the end of the year) in order to have the empirical data that tells us if we will also need to change the source or not, but everything indicates that, in the end, if we want to change to a new generation graphics card we will have to spend extra money to also change the power supply.
