News PowerColor's new tech uses the NPU to reduce gaming power usage — vendor-provided benchmarks show up to 22.4% lower power consumption

[CmdrShepard]

TOPS is short for "Trillions of Operations Per Second" and not limited to tensors. The operations they're counting are addition and multiplication, with multiply-accumulate or fused multiply-add counting as two ops.

Yeah I know, it was a joke.

No, the reason is that it's optimized for inferencing neural networks.

The sarcasm went right over your head it seems.

 

[bit_user]

Yeah I know, it was a joke.

The sarcasm went right over your head it seems.

You used the /s tag last time, but not in this post.

 

[Amdlova]

Fanboiiii

 

[TechyIT223]

Uh, what other brands do they own?

I wasn't actually sure what other brands the company owned, because that was my hunch, but it appears Metal M has already cleared up any confusion, and answered your query. 😀

But I do remember dataland being on the list.

 

[Deleted member 2731765]

But I do remember dataland being on the list.

And, now, that brand is long gone for some unknown reason ! Though, it could be a temporary hiatus more like.

 

[CmdrShepard]

You used the /s tag last time, but not in this post.

Apparently one has to include /s in the signature nowadays.

 

[TJ Hooker]

The NPU which was used here tactfully regulates the power supply to the GPU based on an algorithm.

This relieves the voltage regulator module and MOSFETs of the card, by offloading the burden from the VRMs and MOSFETs. That's why we can see power savings and also lower temperature values here.

The NPU itself requires roughly 2.5 watts though, and is soldered to the video card.

So this is how it stacks up based on the testing done by the company. Cyberpunk 2077 and Final Fantasy XV tested on a "prototype" AMD 7900 XTX:

• Default power settings: 263.2W / 338.6W
• AMD ECO mode settings: 214.5W / 271.4W
• With Power Saving (NPU): 205.3W / 262.9W

How exactly can you offload power delivery from MOSFETs/VRM to an NPU? That doesn't make sense to me. Maybe you could offload some of the controller functionality, but those draw next to no power themselves.

I'm guessing this is supposed to be some sort of 'smart' power/frequency throttling and/or undervolting. But there isn't really enough info to say how it compares to just manually undervolting and/or reducing power limits.

On that note, does anyone know what exactly the "AMD power saving" results represent? I'm pretty sure ECO mode is a CPU thing rather than GPU, and is just setting a fixed, lower TDP/PPT value.

 

[Deleted member 2731765]

How exactly can you offload power delivery from MOSFETs/VRM to an NPU?

Hi TJ, I'm not exactly sure how they are doing this, but this is what the company rep told. Details were not divulged much, but I will try grabbing more info and will update it here, or make a new post.

But what I do know for sure is that this new NPU tech does also operate on a hardware level, apart from software.

 

[bit_user]

Apparently one has to include /s in the signature nowadays.

I'd only recommend that if you never want to be taken seriously!
; )

 

[KnightShadey]

Hiya bit !

The following brands come under TUL, or should I rather say used to be a part of TUL corp. ?

SPARKLE (Active, but currently their main focus is on Intel ARC GPUs, but AMD is in the pipeline). Although they say they are a private firm, TUL has been the brand's main holder. https://www.sparkle.com.tw/

Ahh the old mix & match decoder ring. Was way worse back in the old R9700 & GF5800 days, but some of the same players being resurrected from dead 3DFx brands, etc. similar to sparkle with intel ARC.

IIRC Sparkle was primarily an nVidia brand with their use of AMD mostly limited to eGPUs.

BTW , TUL has been trying to distance themselves publicly from Sparkle for a while, surprising if they had a controlling stake.

https://www.powercolor.com/new?id=1523261066

 

[Deleted member 2731765]

SPARKLE used to make Nvidia cards back in days when the GeForce 8000/9000 series of GPUs were popular, the GeForce 8/9 lineup.

 

[jalyst]

Details were not divulged much, but I will try grabbing more info and will update it here, or make a new post. But what I do know for sure is that…

did you make a new post?

 

[TechyIT223]

SPARKLE used to make Nvidia cards back in days when the GeForce 8000/9000 series of GPUs were popular, the GeForce 8/9 lineup.

That's strange. I thought sparkle was a new GPU brand. Didn't know they were that old from GeForce days. 😀

 

[Deleted member 2731765]

did you make a new post?

No. Didn't get any update yet.