Energy-Efficient Computing and Data Centers

4Power Consumption of Servers and Workloads

This chapter covers the theoretical power and performance characteristics of Intel Xeon processors and NVIDIA GPUs across several generations. It also presents power, thermal and performance measurements of air-cooled platforms equipped with an Intel Xeon processor and NVIDIA GPU running a selection of workloads.

While we take Intel processors and NVIDIA GPUs as examples, CPUs and GPUs developed by other vendors like AMD (Mutjaba 2018; Wikipedia n.d.) or ARM (ARM n.d.) follow the same trends as the law of physics are the same for all.

4.1. Trends in power consumption for processors

Table 4.1 presents the Thermal Design Power (TDP), cores/chip, lithography size, core frequency, number of transistors per chip and peak floating-point performance in single and double precision (DP) gigaflops (GFlops) for the Intel Xeon processors from Woodcrest in 2006, which was the first Intel Core microarchitecture¹ up to Skylake in 2017. TDP of a processor is the maximum power it can dissipate without exceeding the maximum junction temperature this CPU can sustain. Single precision (SP) and DP GFlops are the theoretical peak performance of all cores on the socket. This peak performance is obtained by multiplying the number of cores on the socket × the core frequency × the number of SP or DP operations the processor is theoretically capable of executing in one processor cycle. SP and DP are also sometimes called FP32 and FP64 since SP and DP floating ...