Prove that! Where is significant difference between rtx 3060 and rtx 3090 because of efficiency smaller than non efficiency larger design.
Damn, I wish I placed a bet on getting this response - I was expecting this exact misunderstanding. The 3060 is a smaller implementation of the exact same architecture as the 3090. What I said was
Smaller designs can always be more efficient than larger designs
So, designs, not implementations. All currently known Ampere is the same design, the same overall architecture, with the same limits and possibilities, just implemented at different sizes. I could of course have said "architectures with more limited scaling potential" rather than "smaller designs", but I was expecting a tad more understanding given that this is a tech enthusiast forum. If, on the other hand, Nvidia made a special variant of Ampere that by design
couldn't scale past 3584 shaders or 112 TMUs or 48 ROPs or whatever limitation they chose, they could indeed make such a design more efficient than the current one that can scale higher. How? By designing the internal interconnects, datapaths and layouts to be more optimal up to that size. Given the still large size of that chip, the difference might not be massive, as there's far more to gain in really small (APU/mobile type layouts) - the size differences are simply more meaningful between a 60mm² GPU and a 300mm² one than between a 300mm² one and a 500mm² one. Current PC GPU designs are made around easy scaling and implementation of a wide range of designs that need only minor driver and firmware tweaks between them; more specialized designs can always be more efficient - but the amount of work needed to make them work would also increase drastically.
If the cooling solution hasn't evolved for the Phoenix since the 1660, it will be a piece of hot crap, really:
View attachment 194311
The 1660 is a significantly cheaper and lower end GPU with a much lower TDP (120W vs. 170W) than the 3060 so this won't have that kind of cooler.