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Comment by notjes | Hacker News Reader

OT but got me thinking:

I member my old Voodoo graphics card had like 10 to 15 Watts. Then was surprised how much power the 6800Ultra consumed: whooping 70Watts. Those numbers are peanuts today. 350W for the AMD and 450W for the nVidia card.

AMD is predicting 0.7kW in 2025. I imagine in 2030 people will be having some some fancy CPU and RAM, but that GPU will be sitting on top of a 2kg block of copper to keep up with the heat generation. 1.2kW Cards here we go!

Next up: that power cable coming out of that wall is going straight into the GPU.

https://sundries.com.ua/en/the-power-consumption-of-video-ca...

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>> Next up: that power cable coming out of that wall is going straight into the GPU.

This is already a thing in some servers, and of course, crypto miners that use server power supplies + adapter boards + 8-pin plugs to power the GPUs separately. You chain the server PSU with your ATX PSU using a jumper and they start simultaneously. No doubt that some form of that is coming to gaming and machine learning PCs soon. (It's already here for ML builds actually, but not that widespread I guess)

>Next up: that power cable coming out of that wall is going straight into the GPU.

It kind of seems like we're evolving towards the GPU being the "main computer".

We need to keep an extra close eye on things like open standards and free drivers. nVidia's closed-source stack only feels like a minor hassle right now, but if you think of the GPU as the heart of the system it puts us right back to the bad old days of computing where cross-platform was impossible, compilers were vendored, and operating systems were closed source. We got into the current cushy situation of PC compatibility by sheer luck, and the "mobile revolution" is a warning sign that we can't take any of it for granted when the computing substrate evolves.

Everything will have to move to water-cooling. Reliably air-cooling more than 1kW in uncontrolled end-user environments starts to get fairly absurd.

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