ATI's key argument against Fermi might be that this chip will be the hottest ever. We can now confirm that it will definitely end up hotter and with a higher TDP than that of ATI's RV870, Radeon HD 5870's Cypress XT chip, but at the same time it will end up faster.
Nvidia
can't do much about it, as the Fermi GF100 40nm architecture is much more complex
and the chip itself is bigger than ATI’s. We still don’t know the final TDP figures,
but GF100, GT300 chip is definitely going to exceed 200W TDP. It's worth noting that ATI
manages to stop at 188W with its Radeon HD 5870 cards.
Some
sources even implied that the single card should end up close to 300W, but we believe
that this would be a bit too much, even for such a big and powerful chip. Imagine the TDP of a dual card, definitely much more than Radeon HD 5970 dual cards' 294W.
All in all,
we believe that end users won’t mind, as long as it stays faster than ATI’s
RV870-powered HD 5870 card.