Gigabyte Server “Power Consumption” Roadmap Points To 600W CPUs & 700W GPUs By 2025

A leaked roadmap from Gigabyte's server division, Giga Computing, has revealed the power consumption trajectory of next-gen CPUs & GPUs.

We have seen that as technology advances, chips become more powerful and also consume more power. While the current generation of CPUs and GPUs are some of the most efficient designs we have ever seen, we have also seen a surge in overall power consumption as demand for higher & faster computational power grows.

Now the leaked roadmap from Giga Computing gives us an idea of what to expect from next-gen server-aimed CPUs and GPUs from the big three including AMD, Intel & NVIDIA. Starting with the CPU side of things, Intel is expected to retain TDPs of up to 350W till the mid of 2024 which includes families such as the 4th Gen Sapphire Rapids-SP and 5th Gen Emerald Rapids-SP Xeon chips.

In the second half of 2024, Intel is expected to release its 6th Gen Granite Rapids & which should push the TDP to 500W, an increase of 43% versus the previous generation. The same is true for AMD who will be releasing the Zen 5-based Turin chips by 2H 2024 and consuming up to 600 Watts of power, an increase of 50% over the Zen 4-based Genoa chips.

Next up, we have the GPUs, PCIe in particular, and in this segment, we have NVIDIA and AMD going up against each other. NVIDIA's 2024 GPUs are said to offer TDPs of up to 500W and it replaces the existing 350-450W H100 PCIe accelerators. It is likely that the 500W GPU would be utilizing the next-gen Blackwell chip architecture that battles against AMD's Instinct-class PCIe accelerators that are also going to feature up to 400W TDPs. NVIDIA has moved on to the newer 12VHPWR standard so it can easily deliver up to 600W of power to its next-gen PCIe solutions.

On the SXM front, only NVIDIA will have a singular 700W offering which already exists in the form of its H100 unit. The successor to this chip is not listed but it is likely to either retain or get closer to the 1KW range. For AMD, its OAM solution is listed up till the MI250 which is rated at 560W and we know that starting with the Instinct MI300 chips, AMD will be leveraging the standard SP5 socket for its multi-chiplet and multi-IP exascale APUs.

Interestingly, there's no mention of Intel's newest accelerators in the roadmap such as the Ponte Vecchio and Xeon GPU Max series. Intel did announce canning its next-gen Rialto Bridge GPUs and will now be launching Falcon Shores as its primary GPU for servers in 2025.

Last but not least, NVIDIA's Grace CPU Superchip and Grace Hopper Superchip are also mentioned and would feature anywhere from 600W to 1000W SKUs. The lineup is expected by the end of 2023 and 1H 2024. So as you can tell from the roadmap, there's no stopping power consumption from going up and we can expect the same from consumer-tier chips though as we saw with Ada GPUs, companies can offer insane amounts of power efficiency despite what early rumors have to say.

News Source: HXL