European Commission: lost the plot?
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http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/10/15/ec-eco-design/1[^] EC Regulations could interfere with your graphics card performance. What a load of b......s! What are they going to try and interfere with next? Maximimum telly size, ban kettle use, electric showers, etc. etc. Whatever you do, don't smoke me a kipper, that also causes environmental issues.:~
Dave Find Me On: Web|Facebook|Twitter|LinkedIn
Folding Stats: Team CodeProject
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http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/10/15/ec-eco-design/1[^] EC Regulations could interfere with your graphics card performance. What a load of b......s! What are they going to try and interfere with next? Maximimum telly size, ban kettle use, electric showers, etc. etc. Whatever you do, don't smoke me a kipper, that also causes environmental issues.:~
Dave Find Me On: Web|Facebook|Twitter|LinkedIn
Folding Stats: Team CodeProject
IMHO, graphic cards are now drawing ridiculous amounts of power (and generating the corresponding ridiculous amounts of heat). If it takes regulation to make the designers think a little more about efficiency, I'm for it. See what happened when Intel realized the Pentium 4 architecture was inefficient (gobbling energy and dissipating heat), and that faster clocking wasn't the answer. We got the Core 2 CPU, which was both faster and consumed less energy. This trend has continued with Core i* and Atoms getting faster and more efficient. This allowed to design much better laptops (lighter, thinner with longer battery operation) and other devices. So if it is possible for CPUs, it should be possible to improve the GPUs also. The makers are moving in this direction already lately, with the same kind of optimizations to idle mode and the same kind of 'turbo' automatic overclocking for performance. EDIT: and from the comments on the linked post, it seems that there is no such actual proposal in the works...
'I'm French! Why do you think I've got this outrrrrageous accent?' Monty Python and the Holy Grail
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http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/10/15/ec-eco-design/1[^] EC Regulations could interfere with your graphics card performance. What a load of b......s! What are they going to try and interfere with next? Maximimum telly size, ban kettle use, electric showers, etc. etc. Whatever you do, don't smoke me a kipper, that also causes environmental issues.:~
Dave Find Me On: Web|Facebook|Twitter|LinkedIn
Folding Stats: Team CodeProject
So I'll just order one from abroad.. regulation defeated.
DaveAuld wrote:
What are they going to try and interfere with next?
They should try to regulate the curvature of cucumbers again. It's a very important issue. Seriously though, this is the EC you're talking about. Their motto is "break the unbreakable, regulate the unregulatable, ROW ROW, FIGHT THE POWER!"
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IMHO, graphic cards are now drawing ridiculous amounts of power (and generating the corresponding ridiculous amounts of heat). If it takes regulation to make the designers think a little more about efficiency, I'm for it. See what happened when Intel realized the Pentium 4 architecture was inefficient (gobbling energy and dissipating heat), and that faster clocking wasn't the answer. We got the Core 2 CPU, which was both faster and consumed less energy. This trend has continued with Core i* and Atoms getting faster and more efficient. This allowed to design much better laptops (lighter, thinner with longer battery operation) and other devices. So if it is possible for CPUs, it should be possible to improve the GPUs also. The makers are moving in this direction already lately, with the same kind of optimizations to idle mode and the same kind of 'turbo' automatic overclocking for performance. EDIT: and from the comments on the linked post, it seems that there is no such actual proposal in the works...
'I'm French! Why do you think I've got this outrrrrageous accent?' Monty Python and the Holy Grail
But it looks like the regulation would be based on something arbitrary (memory bandwidth), instead of something sensible like heat production or power usage. There's no reason a low bandwidth device couldn't be poorly designed and be more wasteful than a higher bandwidth device.
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But it looks like the regulation would be based on something arbitrary (memory bandwidth), instead of something sensible like heat production or power usage. There's no reason a low bandwidth device couldn't be poorly designed and be more wasteful than a higher bandwidth device.
From the article, I gather that the memory bandwidth was proposed as a sorting criterion, not as a limiter. High bandwidth devices would have a higher allowed power usage. From the comments on the article, I gather that this was never a proposal, but rather an old report not yet acted upon.
'I'm French! Why do you think I've got this outrrrrageous accent?' Monty Python and the Holy Grail
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From the article, I gather that the memory bandwidth was proposed as a sorting criterion, not as a limiter. High bandwidth devices would have a higher allowed power usage. From the comments on the article, I gather that this was never a proposal, but rather an old report not yet acted upon.
'I'm French! Why do you think I've got this outrrrrageous accent?' Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Julien Villers wrote:
High bandwidth devices would have a higher allowed power usage.
That makes more sense. And in the end, as long as I can still buy overpowered GPUs in the US, I'm happy. It's about time to get some new ones so I can play games properly at 2560x1440, the environment is less important than my entertainment! :laugh:
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http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/10/15/ec-eco-design/1[^] EC Regulations could interfere with your graphics card performance. What a load of b......s! What are they going to try and interfere with next? Maximimum telly size, ban kettle use, electric showers, etc. etc. Whatever you do, don't smoke me a kipper, that also causes environmental issues.:~
Dave Find Me On: Web|Facebook|Twitter|LinkedIn
Folding Stats: Team CodeProject
The EC's Eco-Design guidelines will make it near-impossible to release a graphics card with more than 320GB/s of available memory bandwidth. Near impossible is not nearly impossible enough to be impossible. The only thing I hear is an industry whining because they have to put effort into making new products instead of upscaling old junk for years and rip us off. I support the decisions of the EU commission on this, because I want to live in a country where every product I can buy has minimal standard of quality. That is perhaps the only thing that makes me proud to be European.
Giraffes are not real.