Nanotech - The Circuits Blog

There is an ungreen revolution taking place in enthusiast game PC circles.

A 1,250-watt power supply--this one from Cooler Master--is the largest a game PC maker will install today.

(Credit: Cooler Master)

The eye-opening graphics possible on today's game PCs come at a cost: light-dimming power consumption. The trend, rooted in the perennial quest for more speed, bucks the overall greening of the PC industry.

Green PC designs have become more than just practical; they're cool. Power-sipping Netbooks are in, as are small desktops like the Dell Studio Hybrid and Hewlett-Packard Pavilion Slimline.

This is not the case for high-end gaming PCs, where bigger is better. How far this trend can go isn't clear, but a seminal event in Apple's history may offer a lesson. In 2001, Apple unveiled one of the first dual-processor consumer systems, based on the overheating-prone IBM PowerPC G4 processor. The original Apple tower design had a Rube Goldberg feel to it, with a host of fans straining to rid the system of heat. A noise like that emitted by a wind tunnel, generated by the power supply and fans, forced Apple to redesign the system.

This symbolized why Apple eventually abandoned PowerPC: The platform wasn't efficient with power.

Fast-forward to 2008. Game rig makers are cramming as many as four graphics chips into high-end boxes that are notable not only for performance but also for the power they consume. As a consequence, big power supply units are in vogue. Today, bragging rights extend to the units themselves: some systems boasting boutique brand names such as Cooler Master and SilverStone draw 1,200 watts--roughly three times the power requirements of game systems a few years ago.

It's an ominous trend, according to box makers. "If this trend does continue, then, yes, it will give us problems," said George Yang, an engineer at Los Angeles-based game rig maker IBuyPower. "A regular home user would have to have an electrician come in, get the outlet out, and plug in a higher breaker," Yang said. Today, some of the higher-end systems with big power supplies require a special wall power socket, according to Yang.

Other game rig makers are equally concerned. "I swore that I'd never break 1,000 (watts)," said Kelt Reeves, president of game PC maker Falcon Northwest. "Unfortunately, that's been the solution for the past several years. Bigger, bigger, bigger power supplies."

Reeves says that 1,200 watts is now essential for gaming systems based on multiple boards from Nvidia or AMD's ATI graphics unit. "With three GTX 280s or two of the R700 cards, we're recommending they go with a 1,200-watt power supply," Reeves said, referring to the newest graphics chips from Nvidia and ATI respectively.

This is just about the limit, he said. "We can't go too much more over that before--if you actually pull that (power)--you start tripping the client's household circuit breaker."

Neither Nvidia nor ATI show any signs of slowing down, according to Reeves. "Eventually these chips get so hot that their own heat becomes a barrier to performance," he said.

Nvidia admits that its chips are drawing more power than before. "If we go back about three years, our graphics card power was in the 120- to 130-watt range," said Jason Paul, product manager in charge of enthusiast GPUs (graphics processing units) at Nvidia. "The GTX 280 which we launched a couple of months back, it's around 230 watts (of) graphics card power," he said.

But Paul claims the performance per watt is the key yardstick, not raw power. "Where you see a little under 2X increase in maximum power, you've seen probably 3-times or 4-times (the) increase in the level of performance. So, overall we see a substantial improvement in performance per watt. This is the big metric we track to ensure we're delivering efficient architectures. "

Paul says Nvidia has implemented power savings techniques on its GTX 280 that keep the power down when it's not running at top performance loads. "With the GTX 280 at idle, that card runs at about 25 watts, which is one-tenth of its absolute worst-case power," he said. Nvidia also offers hybrid graphics technology that turns off all the power-sucking boards when they're not in use.

Dell XPS 730 game box uses special liquid cooling to control heat.

(Credit: Dell Computer)

Moreover, Paul says that the multiboard systems are limited to a small niche at the very top of the market. "There's definitely a segment of the market that wants more and more performance. Remember, however, that this is the ultimate performance (segment)."

But game box makers ship many--if not most--of their systems to the very niche that Paul is describing. "We're all about the high end. The higher-end the graphics card is, and the more expensive, the more we sell," said Reeves.

And the trend in power supplies exemplifies how this market has changed. "The power supply used to be just silver box, and nobody gave it a second thought," he said. "(But) as graphics cards have evolved, they have forced the power supply makers to keep providing more and more power pipes--or cabling--to the graphics cards"--increasing the unit's complexity, he said.

Reeves cites GPUs, not CPUs from Intel, as the culprit. "The latest CPUs use very little wattage. If you overclock a 3GHz Intel CPU to 4GHz, you might pull 40 more watts. Whereas a graphics card, you put three of them in a system, they'll pull 800 watts running some of the higher-end games," he said.

Advanced Micro Devices announced on Monday its most powerful graphics technology to date, going after Nvidia in the rarified--and closely watched--enthusiast game segment.

This also marks the current performance pinnacle of AMD's strategy to beat Nvidia at the high end by building comparatively smaller chips and then ganging them together for better performance.

The ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics board houses two 4870 graphics processing units (GPUs) and competes with Nvidia's fastest board, based on the GTX 280. In chip-to-chip competition, Nvidia's GTX 280 generally beats a single 4870 in performance because it's bigger and faster: the Nvidia chip packs 1.4 billion transistors onto one chip, while ATI has about 950 million.

But because AMD puts two chips on one board and has improved chip-to-chip communication, the 4870 X2 is is expected to equal or exceed the Nvidia chip in many cases.

AMD has introduced a more advanced cross-GPU connection technology based on the PCIe Generation 2 standard. And the 4807 X2 can use two gigabytes of memory, compared to most high-end boards that use a maximum of one gigabyte. It also uses memory based on the new GDDR5 standard.

AMD says the 4870 X2 delivers over 3X the bandwidth of the its previous dual-GPU board, the 3870 X2

(Credit: AMD)

One of the central challenges for AMD is to make sure the performance scales up efficiently when more chips are added. This is the crux of AMD's strategy: instead of building a large monolithic--albeit fast--chip as Nvidia typically does, AMD takes smaller chips and gangs them together for better performance.

To date, the results for multi-GPU performance have been problematic, typically another board will deliver only 1.5 times better performance. AMD is targeting 1.8 the performance with two chips running games in high resolution, and with four of them, about 2.5, according to earlier comments from Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research.

Game PC vendors expect good things. "(The 4870 X2 is) more than a match for a single Nvidia GTX 280, and depending on the title sometimes a match for two GTX 280s," said Kelt Reeves, CEO of game PC maker Falcon Northwest, responding to an email query. "Drivers are now ATI's only weak area, so the 4870 X2's performance and scaling with two 4870 X2s (QuadFire) often varies widely from title to title," he said.

In September, AMD is also expected to bring out the HD 4850 X2, a dual-chip board with slightly lower performance. The higher-end 4870 X2 is rated at 2.4 TFLOPs (or teraFLOPs a common yardstick for raw graphics chip compute power) and communicates with memory at 230GB per second, while the 4850 X2 is rated at 2.0 TFLOPs and has a memory bandwidth of 128GB/sec.

Both boards will integrate 1600 stream processors, which do parallel processing on streams of data.

The 4870 X2 is priced at $549. Nvidia preemptively responded to this by cutting the price on the GTX 280 to $499 in July.

The lower-end 4850 X2 will be available in September for $399.

AMD thriving in Intel Centrino 2 notebooks? At Hewlett-Packard, the world's largest PC maker, the answer is "yes."

HP 17-inch 6830s is offered with the AMD-ATI HD 3430 graphics chip.

(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)

Although consumer notebooks get most of the press, business notebooks get most of the sales. "The prime purchaser of notebooks still remains, as a segment, business," Intel CEO Paul Otellini said during the Intel earnings conference call earlier this week.

Among Hewlett-Packard's slew of upcoming business notebooks (HP Compaq 6730s, 6830s, 6530b, 6930b) with Centrino 2 processors, Advanced Micro Devices' ATI graphics chips figure prominently. And notebooks such as the HP Compaq 6830s and EliteBook 6930p are offered with comparatively high-end AMD-ATI mobile graphics.

"It reflects new design wins," said Dean McCarron, principal at Cave Creek, Ariz.-based Mercury Research.

"Those design wins were locked down last year," new AMD CEO Dirk Meyer said in the company's earnings conference call Thursday, referring to AMD graphics-chip design wins on the Centrino 2 platform. "So, now is when they will start to pay off. (We're) getting 60-plus percent design win share on (Centrino 2)."

The Centrino-2-based EliteBook, for example, packs an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3450 with up to 256MB of memory. This kind of robust graphics configuration for a business notebook was almost unheard of a year ago when Intel's integrated graphics garnered most of the design wins.

Though Intel's new and improved GMA 4500HD Centrino 2 graphics is offered alongside AMD-ATI graphics in many new HP business notebooks, HP is also selling AMD-only business notebooks based on its Puma platform--AMD's answer to Centrino 2. The upcoming HP Compaq 6735s, for example, offers the AMD Turion X2 Ultra (2.2GHz) with integrated AMD graphics.

Overall, AMD-ATI graphics dominate HP's mainstream business notebook line-up. Out of 16 models listed on HP's "Balanced Mobility" notebook page, a whopping 10 systems are offered with AMD-ATI graphics. And five AMD-only systems appear in the line-up using AMD Turion and Athon X2 processors.

Here are the Intel and AMD processors used in new HP mainstream business notebook PCs:

Intel Core 2 Duo T9600 (2.8GHz, 6MB L2 cache, 1066MHz FSB)
Intel® Core 2 Duo T9400 (2.53GHz, 6MB L2 cache, 1066MHz FSB)
Intel® Core 2 Duo P8600 (2.4GHz, 3MB L2 cache, 1066MHz FSB)
Intel® Core 2 Duo P8400 (2.26GHz, 3MB L2 cache, 1066MHz FSB)

AMD Turion X2 Ultra Dual-Core ZM-82 (2.2GHz, 2MB L2 cache)
AMD Turion X2 Ultra Dual-Core ZM-80 (2.1GHz, 2MB L2 cache)
AMD Turion X2 Dual-Core RM-70 (2GHz, 1MB L2 cache)
AMD Athlon X2 Dual-Core QL-60 (1.9GHz, 1MB L2 cache)
AMD Sempron SI-40 (2GHz, 512KB L2 cache)

Dell's Alienware unit is slated to put AMD-ATI front and center. The Dell subsidiary will bring out a relatively low-cost game PC with dual ATI graphics chips within the next two weeks.

This comes in the wake of a report that Dell will phase out its XPS game PC line in favor of Alienware systems.

Alienware will ship a system with 4GB of memory, two ATI graphics chips, and a quad-core AMD processor for less than $1,700, dirt cheap in the gaming PC world.

(Credit: Alienware)

The $1,699 system--cheap by game PC standards--will come with 4GB (DDR2 800MHz) memory, a quad-core 9550 (2.2GHz) Phenom X4 processor, and a 3870 X2 board with two ATI HD 3870 graphics chips, said Marc Diana, Alienware product marketing manager for desktops. The system will ship within 48 hours, he said.

It will also sport an Asus high-end motherboard based on the AMD 790FX chipset, Diana said.

Systems configured with a quad-core processor and dual graphics chips are typically well over $2,000.

Overall, Alienware is seeing respectable demand for AMD-based systems. "AMD is a good entry point," according to Diana.

Alienware is already offering a relatively high-end system for less than $3,000 with a quad-core Phenom X4 9850 (2.5GHz) "Black Edition" (Black Edition indicates that the processor can be overclocked) and two ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics boards (each with two 3870 graphics chips).

"It's not your granddaddy's AMD system. We're talking top-of-the-line quad core," he said.

This not the sentiment at all game PC makers, however. Falcon Northwest is seeing virtually no demand for AMD-based systems, according to a spokesperson at that company. Falcon Northwest sells Intel-based systems almost exclusively. The company attributes this to the fact that customers are spending big bucks for its systems and that they will invariably opt for higher-performing Intel chips.

Diana concedes that AMD will not take the performance crown--this goes to Intel. And in graphics, Nvidia typically performs better in games than ATI, he said. "(Nvidia is) able to refine their drivers more for the most popular games," he said.

And in the laptop gaming space, Intel-Nvidia rules too. Currently, Alienware offers no AMD-based gaming laptops, though this may change in the future when AMD brings out its Puma mobile platform later this quarter.

Alienware recently began selling a gaming laptop, the Area-51 m17x, with two Nvidia GeForce 8800M GTX graphics chips and the Intel Core 2 Extreme processor, starting at about $3,200.

On Monday, Hewlett-Packard's Japan arm introduced a raft of consumer PCs with plenty of offerings using processors from Advanced Micro Devices in addition to Intel chips.

In the v7000 small-form-factor tower series, HP deployed both the AMD triple-core Phenom X3 processor and quad-core Phenom X4 processors. Models are available with the X3 8400 (2.1GHz), low-power X4 9100e (1.8GHz, 65 watts), and X4 9500 (2.2GHz).

HP tx2105 ultraportable notebook (top) and HP s3000 and v7000 series desktops (bottom)

(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)

Interestingly, AMD-based models in the v7000 series come with Nvidia graphics, not AMD-ATI graphics, a synergy that AMD has had trouble realizing in some segments. Configurations are offered with either the NVIDIA GeForce 6150SE, GeForce 8400HD, or GeForce 8500GT graphics chips.

Phenom X3-based systems start at around 69,930 yen or just under $700.

The 4.3-pound TX 2105/CT ultraportable notebook uses a dual-core Athlon 64 X2 TK-57 processor. Another model comes with the AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60 processor. All models pack NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150 graphics. Pricing starts at just over $900.

Intel-based HP notebooks were introduced with an array of processors including new 45-nanometer Core 2 Duo T8100 and T9300 processors as well as Celeron 540/560 series chips. But no AMD-ATI graphics here either. Systems come with one of the following: Intel X3100, NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS, or NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS graphics.

Intel-based desktop systems come with dual-core Core 2 Duo E8400 and quad-core Core 2 Quad Q9300 processors, among other configurations. Graphics chips offered are the NVIDIA GeForce 8400HD and NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT.