To begin with, CEC hopes to make computers more energy-efficient by setting idle power consumption targets for manufacturers to design their desktops to meet. The average Joe's office desktop should have no problems meeting those targets, as the technology needed to drive such applications has already approached such level of efficiency. Gaming PCs and workstations, on the other hand, will be given exemptions on the basis of an "expandability score." This is built around the idea that some users need machines that are expandable to meet their growing computational needs (think a video production firm that needs to change components in its workstations as it's moving from 4K to 5K video editing).
This "expandability score" is determined by a number of factors, most importantly, the features of specific hardware components. The higher your product's expandability score, the more "maximum idle power draw" it's allowed to have. Logically, something like this shouldn't affect DIY PC enthusiasts (people who assemble their own gaming PCs or workstations by purchasing components separately), since the resulting build is not technically a product, but an assemblage of products. This should, however, affect pre-built gaming desktop/workstation manufacturers.
One of the interesting specs on the basis of which a gaming desktop will be granted a "high" expandability score is the memory bandwidth of installed graphics cards. The draft regulations prescribe a graphics card with at least 400 GB/s will qualify for high-expandability exemptions in the year 2018. The regulators are aware the technology moves forward, and so does memory bandwidth, and so they set this minimum bandwidth requirement to 600 GB/s by 2020. This, in our opinion, is highly arbitrary. Today's high-end graphics cards such as the GeForce GTX 1080, only feature 320 GB/s, and it's expected that by 2018, mid-range GPUs will have the kind of processing power (and importantly memory bandwidth) of the GTX 1080. So you'll see mid-range GPUs with wastefully expensive memory to meet those bandwidth requirements. High-end GPUs will have moved on to faster memory standards such as GDDR6 and HBM2.
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