AMD Releases Statement On Radeon RX 480 Power Consumption; More Details Tuesday
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2016 5:05 AM EST
Following up on this week's Radeon RX 480 launch, there has been some questions raised about the power consumption of the card. This is after some sites whom directly tap the power rails feeding the card discovered that at least some of their samples were pulling more than the standard-allowed 75W over the PCIe slot and/or 6-pin PCIe external power connector.
To that end, it would appear that AMD's staff is working weekend duty, and they have just sent over the following statement.
As you know, we continuously tune our GPUs in order to maximize their performance within their given power envelopes and the speed of the memory interface, which in this case is an unprecedented 8Gbps for GDDR5. Recently, we identified select scenarios where the tuning of some RX 480 boards was not optimal. Fortunately, we can adjust the GPU's tuning via software in order to resolve this issue. We are already testing a driver that implements a fix, and we will provide an update to the community on our progress on Tuesday (July 5, 2016).
If some of the data is to be believed, these cards are exceeding 150W total at times, which would mean there is either something causing them to run in the wrong power state, or they are just outright exeeding their power limit and need to be throttled back. As we don't do per-rail testing I don't have anything meaningful to add at this second, but it will be very interesting to see how AMD responds next week.
Update 07/06: AMD has since released their status update, which you can find here.
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atlantico - Sunday, July 3, 2016 - link
People are sick and tired of Nvidia doing criminal things, anti-consumer behavior and good grief hearing about their honestly quite mediocre GPUs being hailed as awesome by kids spending their mommy's money is just eye-rollingly annoying.sonicmerlin - Monday, July 4, 2016 - link
This is very true. I wanted AMD to succeed for the longest time but now having seen them utterly fail over and over again I want someone to bury their executives in a cave, seize all their money, and hire a new board.Weyoun0 - Saturday, July 2, 2016 - link
It is obvious to anyone to who is not irrationally and hopelessly optimistic about AMD. Anyone with a neutral perspective and analyze AMD using numbers and not emotions can see how poor AMD is doing and has been doing for decades. AMD has made no important changes to corporate strategy or leadership and does not seem like they plan such changes in the near future. Their downfall is only inevitable. When the market was at its height, those that started warning about the upcoming subprime mortgage crises were also dismissed as "trolls," but how right there were.Diogenes5 - Sunday, July 3, 2016 - link
Your comment was so dumb it deserved a response.Please don't reproduce in the interests of evolution.
Idiot.
Michael Bay - Sunday, July 3, 2016 - link
I like how you always sign in the end of your posts, dudebro!Chaser - Saturday, July 2, 2016 - link
As soon as the GTX1060 is released this fanboi fueled hype dream will come to an end.quaz0r - Saturday, July 2, 2016 - link
even though saying "whom" all the time might seem like it sounds smart, it is not always correct. :]Leosch - Saturday, July 2, 2016 - link
You're right, "some sites" is in the nominative case there.DonMiguel85 - Saturday, July 2, 2016 - link
Yeah, it's a shame we won't see a MacBook Pro with Pascal anytime soon since that would have awesome battery life, but Polaris is the next best thing at this point. Maybe Apple likes their compute prowess for some reason too.Geranium - Saturday, July 2, 2016 - link
Apple uses OpenCL, in which NVIDIA's support is not that good. Maybe thats why we may not see pascal in MacBook Pro.