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ATI Technologies said Friday it had employed technologies originally designed to reduce energy consumption of graphics processors for notebooks to trim power hunger of high-end desktop graphics cards, such as Radeon X1800 or more advanced.

When X-bit labs originally measured power consumption of high-end Radeon X1800 XT graphics card back in September, 2005, it was about 112W under maximum recently, the absolute maximum for that time. However, when the measurements were carried out later, the power consumption dropped to slightly below 103W on the same graphics card with the same BIOS version, but on a newer driver.

ATI Technologies has since the launch of the Radeon X1800-series back in October, 2005, introduced new BIOS versions for the graphics cards that decreased clock-speeds when high performance in 3D applications was not required. Additionally, ATI employed dynamic clock gating technology originally introduced along with the Mobility Radeon graphics chip, which shuts down unused parts of graphics processor preserving them from consuming power and also reducing current leakage, a problem for today’s high-speed chips.

Another major developer of graphics processors – Nvidia Corp. – did not immediately return email seeking for comment in regards of usage mobile power-saving technology by Nvidia GeForce processors for desktops. Nvidia’s high-end graphics processors consume less compared to ATI’s.

Intel Corp., the world’s largest chipmaker, also uses technology originally developed for mobile processors to restrain power consumption of desktop and server processors. The latest desktop Pentium processors, with some exceptions, support enhanced Halt state (C1E), a capability that allows operating system to halt the processor when it is not needed, as well as Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology (EIST), a feature that dynamically reduces clock-speed by 200MHz increments when the load is not high.

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