Rumour: AMD Radeon HD 7000 supports PCI-E 3
Will more bandwidth mean more speed? We'll have to wait a few months to find out.
The inclusion of PCI-E 3 support isn’t a huge surprise – MSI has already announced that its Z68A-GD80 (G3) motherboard will support the standard, and Intel’s Ivy Bridge chipset is rumoured to incorporate PCI-E 3 support too.
The PCI-E 3 spec was finalised in November 2010, and it essentially doubles the bandwidth per lane, while remaining backwards compatible with previous generation PCI-E connections.
However, the new spec doesn’t increase the power ceiling, instead just consolidating the existing 150W and 300W standards, despite the fact that some of today's graphics cards already break the 300W limit.
We expect to see the next generation of graphics cards this autumn, so we’ll have to wait a few months to find out what difference is made by PCI-E 3 support.
Do you think the extra bandwidth will net you any more extra performance? Is it wise to keep the 300W power limit, or is this an oversight? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyThis is like platter-based hard drives supporting SATA 3.
Neat, but pointless.
Next gen GPUs will hopefully use a lot less power.
Why use less power when you can increase performance. ;)
PCIe 3 will mean better multi-card support, and higher upload/download bandwidth for those cards that may speak directly to the CPU.
HOWEVER, for the Bus itself and small add on cards it'll be enormous. A lot of current SATA3 and USB3 add-on cards are limited by being connected through a PCI-e 2 x1 lane. Bump that to PCI-e 3 and you have enough bandwidth to saturate SATA3 and USB3. Also you now are able to get 4 port GbE NICs on a single lane, 10GbE NICs on a single lane. Go with Intels suggested/recommended new x2 lane setup and you have the equivelent of a full on PCI-e 2 x4 lane slot for things like 4 port RAID cards, etc. You could also start implementing new graphics cards standards that run off a lowly x4 PCI-e port if you wanted to (most lower end cards currently don't even really saturate a x8 PCI-e slot).
You also have twice the total bandwidth on the bus. Especially useful for entry level Intel CPU/chipsets that only support x16 lanes of PCI-e. You use most of that with a single high end discrete GPU. Obviously you aren't going to be using much of that bandwidth for other things when you are gaming, but think of a couple high end discrete GPUs in crossfire, combined with a GbE NIC (or worse a 10GbE NIC) passing large amounts of info and a x4 RAID card making a backup over the network. You are going to be mashing a god awful amount of data through a "restrictive" bus.
Storage that is another matter. It is - pretty much - the only major branch of IT industry which will benefit from more bandwidth introduced with Gen.3. It will simplify manufacturing process by reducing number of x16 slots. x8 slot will provide as much bandwidth. And for entry level servers and workstations I can see moving back to x4 slot which will provide same amount of bandwidth as Gen.2 x8.
300W limit. Hmm that is a tough one. I would gladly see limit reduced. There is no hope in hell to see any major breakthrough in the way modern PC is created. Of course as everybody I would love to see CPU with power of 30x i7 or VGA with GTX580 performance multiplied by 30 and both draining 5W. But that won't happen for next 50 years or so. And at that point I won't care too much about PCs! :D Anyway, I think there should be tendency to create bigger PSU to feed power directly instead stressing motherboard circuitry.
I completely agree. If there are any devices that actually use 100% of the PCIE 2 bandwidth then there's probably less than 3 of those products altogether. I would be interested to see how today's top-end GPUs and SSDs perform on pcie 3 but I'm sure it's probably going to be a 1FPS difference.
As for PCIE 3 not upping the wattage amount - good. Both AMD and Nvidia should not have made cards that exceed that limit. I think it's stupid that they're trying to make these behemoth cards that are so big they can't fit in the average case, spew so much heat that you need to water cooling them, probably consume more power than all of your other electronic devices combined, and in games gives you far more FPS than physically possible to notice.
The power limitation on PCIE helps keep practical products.
The former seems unlikely, but is the latter really an issue? Other than not being able to write PCI-E anywhere on your box, documentation, website, etc (I'm sure some creative workarounds could be found), is there something else that prevents manufacturers from breaking this part of the spec? Some sort of patent agreement whereby non-compliance with any part opens you up to being sued for even using something that is partially compatible with PCI-E?
There were two 600W GPUs on show at Computex, one of which was definitely being put into production.
EVERY OTHER process change ever says your wrong.
40nm saw vapor chambers getting the norm.
They pretty much ran out of better ways to cool smaller surfaces.
I'm really curious as to what's gonna happen next. What will be used to increase cooling power? Artificially make chips larger by compartimentalising them into blocks deliberately spread appart from each other?
Also, look at laptops.
They got more powerful AND use less power.
That wouldn't really do any good since the density of transistors wouldn't decrease.
Then how is crossfire/SLI working?
I'm not talking spreading transistors individually, but spreading blocks of them. In the scale of maybe cutting a chip in 4 and spreading it over an area twice its size.
yeah not shabby.. double the bandwidth and still within spec of current power supplies
I was quoting this: "They're skipping 32nm and going straight to 28nm.
Next gen GPUs will hopefully use a lot less power." New process has never really meant a trend of falling power consumption for GPUs
I never wrote this, this is someone else's quote.
I was quoting this: "They're skipping 32nm and going straight to 28nm.
Next gen GPUs will hopefully use a lot less power." New process has never really meant a trend of falling power consumption for GPUs
The placement and design of those is an open discussion though I'd say.
300W is the total power draw. The max allowed by the spec for the PCI-E connector itself is 75W. Which follows what Tattysnuc already said - so the limit is likely a lot lower than he realized. And I would take a guess that that is the limitation - you can't suck too much power through traces on a board before things start catching on fire ;)
Does it make sense? I think so. After replacing my water heater with a much more efficient model, I felt justified in getting a video card that takes a single 6-pin connector. That is, power draw is one of the things that limits me in what hardware I get, to some degree. It doesn't make sense to me to run a machine drawing nearly a kilowatt from the wall (extreme example, but they do exist) just because I want my shadows to be extra shadowy and my explosions extra explodey when I'm gaming. I'm not passing judgment on that, though - if that's what you dig, go for it. For me, though, give me a card with the power draw of the 5770 with the capabilities of the GTX570 and that would be all I need for a good long while. Not that it's likely to happen anytime soon.
nVidia cards of late seem to have much higher power draws, so you could be waiting an awful long time there.
You might not have so long to wait to get 6950 performance for a 5770 power draw though: currently the same idle and within 18.5% at load.
guru3d finds the following
6950: 158W
5570: 93W +20W (idle)=113W
From these numbers we find the 6950 uses 40% more power than the 5770, or the 5770 uses 28% less power than a 6950.
Yup, and boards could also do 4x PCIe3 x8 which would be the equivalent of 4x PCIe2 x16.
I think it basically means we should start seeing motherboards with all PCIe3 x16 slots, but some running at 8x speed, and the GPU ones at 16x speed. Nothing but full length slots though.
PCI is dead and buried.
I don't think so. Look at any consumer motherboard.
*keeps waiting for Ivy Bridge to be released*
A reference 590 has a TDP of 365w, which is out of spec with PCIe but in reality, if you have the PSU to handle it then its not going to break anything. But even with a crazy WC overclock you'd unlikely hit 500w. Thats liqued nitrogen territory i suspect.
I doubt that's LN2 territory. 2x standard clocked GTX580 would use in excess of 500W
Overclocking a GTX590 to GTX580 clocks wouldn't require LN2 now would it?
Its limits are in it's power circuitry, not in the cooling.
This is already almost hitting 500w aircooled.
Considering how a 570 uses 213W, I'd say this overclocked 590 uses 457w
Of course 2 gtx580s would exceed 500w.. Combined..
These numbers are on a per card basis.. Plus the 590 is not two full 580s on the one pcb, many components are shared. Hence the lower power ceiling. *rolls eyes*
The suggested possibility of higher bandwidth storage cards (raid) or half lane count equal bandwidth graphics seems a more reasonable outcome. Even the gtx580 only sees very minor improvement on x16 over x8.
In 5 years we might have a real need for more than x16 pcie2 but for the near future it's enough.
50 years.........try 5-10 :D
457W ...
Close enough
a true dual GTX580
http://www.techpowerup.com/146588/ASUS-MARS-II-Graphics-Card-Pictured.html
600W of insanity
official pics here
You need a fusion reactor to power this mutha :D
I guess you will need a small mortgage to buy one :( (now where did i put my house deeds......................)
5-10 years you will be able to buy a cpu that outperforms the current sandbybridge by 50 times same with gpus
look at the old 5 series from nvidia its not as old as people think
LOLOLOLOLOLOLLOLOLLL WHAT??? THATS HIGHER THAN MY IRON....
SCREW