Next year, Gigabyte expects 600W server processors and 700W accelerators

The trend of increasing consumption will continue, and at least in the desktop, every next generation that keeps real consumption limits at the level of the previous one is (and will be) a small miracle. However, miracles do not happen in servers, and as outlined by Gigabyte’s roadmap, consumption growth in the coming years will be inevitable. Both in the segment of processors and GPGPU accelerators.

The only thing that can be argued about is how high the increase will be. Let’s take it line by line. Server processors first: At Intel, Gigabyte expects TDP to grow from the current 350 watts to 500 watts, which corresponds with the news we brought you in February:

Compared to the March news, the only thing that changes is that “atomic” Xeons Sierra Forest in the end they will have significantly fewer (about 144) cores, so they probably won’t require 500 watts. On Granite Rapids (large cores) nothing changes.

What can be argued with is the next line, i.e. AMD processors. Gigabyte’s slide includes 600W models, but this does not correspond to AMD’s current roadmap (created now, in the second quarter), which both for the 128-core 4nm Epycy Turinso for 192-core 3nm Epycy Turin Dense counts with 500W TDP. It’s possible that Gigabyte’s leaked material is a bit older and AMD ended up going with 500W TDP instead of 600W. That will become clear in a few months.

Accelerators for PCIe slots follow. Nvidia is counting on a 500W solution for the year 2024, which is really enough for classic cards, however, as it showed on the 450W GeForce RTX 4090 with an optional 600W TDP, this can also be cooled (although the mentioned card actually eats less, especially in 600W mode). Even in 2025, AMD is not supposed to increase the TDP above 400 watts for slot accelerators, and in 2024 it will stick to 350 W.

Accelerators in the form of modules (SMX for Nvidia and OAM for AMD) enable the cooling of more demanding configurations, and 700 watts are expected for Nvidia already this year. There is no data for other years (even for AMD).

Finally, Gigabyte states that for CPU+GPU solution Grace Hopper expects a TDP in the range of 600-1000 watts, which (the processor part is built on ARM architecture) is really enough. However, there is nothing to compare it with, as AMD’s CPU+GPU solution is not explicitly mentioned in the slide. In fact, the Instinct MI300 series will (as the first for AMD) have x86 cores in addition to GPGPU acceleration (Zen 4). It is expected later this year, but there is no new information about it yet.