With 16 pins, does that mean the connector supplies up to 800 W? Since the 4090 goes up to almost 500 W, does that mean the 5090 will need over 600 W? I would not be surprised by this as the 3 nm node is nowhere near ready for this kind of chip so that means Blackwell will be on the same 4 nm process.
Hopefully this means they have built in extra redundancy. 8-pin connectors have 30%-60% additional wattage capacity over their rated 150w load, the 12VHPWR only has 10% or so.
The extra capacity can be helpful if, say, one pin doesn’t make full contact and the other pins need to increase load to compensate.
Also, while there are 600w bios’s out there for 4090’s, short of shunting the power circuits on the card the most they pull is ~550w, and even that is sort of a waste as the performance difference between that and a 450w bios, which many entry level 4090’s have, is only a couple a percent.
4090 is really a 450w card. It can take an extra 100w if you want to squeeze the last couple percent out, but it’s not really indicative of the card. Heck, many 4090 users under volt their cards to 300w-350w and keep 90%-95% of the performance of the 450w config.