Video cards and power consumption

Both AMD and Intel are turning their focus away from ultra-high performance processors to processors that are almost as fast but consume significantly less power.

Do ATI and Nvidia have a similar roadmap, are are we doomed to buying 1KW power supplies to feed our video cards?

[Ristogod]

Eventually they will be forced to follow suite. It's only a matter of time.

They can't really keep going up too much. The heat these new cards put out is astonishing. When the heat off of the video card can cause your CPU temps to rise by 5C, it's putting out too much heat and sucking too much juice.

[DaJMasta]

Intel is introducing all of their new chips based off the Pentium M arcitecture, under 90 Watt power envelopes for Dual core chips, and AMD's AM2 dual core chips should be avalable will be available below 70 Watts by the end of the year. All this with a new emphasis in SFF PCs, which require less power requirements.

As for graphics cards.... I can only hope they follow suit, because they're hotter than P4 775 Dual Core chips already... they don't have too much to go before they need new mounting materials =/

There is some promising stuff though, the new mobility cards are getting significantly faster, and smaller dies yield lower power consumption. There are a few extremely low wattage cards available, like the S27 Chrome, rated at something like under 20 Watts and about 6600 GT speec graphics.