Power Consumption in Perspective

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When reading reviews on the next generation game consoles that were released over the past two weeks, one benchmark in particular caught my eye. Anandtech measured the power consumption of the new Xbox and Playstation, which are not terrible when compared to previous consoles. In comparison to an Apple TV however, their consumption seems gargantuan.

It’s astonishing how graphics cards (and by extension game consoles) continue to evade the constraints of performance-per-watt nearly a decade after every other silicon chip has been designed around this metric. When, if ever, will AMD and Nvidia have a Pentium 4 style crisis of thermal efficiency?