We learned recently that ATI's highly anticipated next GPU will consume up to an incredible 250W to work. No wonder we reported on many occasions that the chip will be one of the hottest ever. It is the 80 nanometre chip and we talked about it already, and well saying it will be a 65 nanometre chip is simply not possible for such a complex chip. We can now confirm that the new ATI card will consume around 250W. The currently fastest ATI graphics card, the R580+ based Radeon X1950 XTX consumes up to 125W in a worst case scenario and heavy 3D, while you can suck up 145W with the dual chip GeForce 7950 GX2 card. Quite a change on power consumption of current graphics accelerators. - The Inquirer

ATI's newly R600 core will consume over 250W power

This means that the R600 chip will consume twice as much power, and probably will end up close to twice as warm but we also hear it will get much faster then the current cards with sixty four pipelines. It could easily end up twice as fast than the current ATI offerings. Well at least that is what the rumors are all about, and with having 64 pipelines it could be possible. Of course as always, it all remains to be seen how it will turn out. It is now a January/February chip, so it will be a while until we have this baby on our desk but after a long time we are getting mildly titillated at the prospect.