TDP: Thermal Design Power
TDP is the sustained heat output in watts that a CPU's cooling must dissipate at its base operating point. It guides heatsink, fan, and rack cooling design. A higher TDP generally means more cores or higher clocks, and more heat and power draw to plan for.
TDP represents the thermal load a processor generates under a sustained workload at base frequency, expressed in watts. Cooling systems are sized to this figure so the chip stays within temperature limits. It is a design target for heat dissipation, not an exact measure of peak power, since boost states can briefly exceed it.
Server CPUs span a wide TDP range, from around 105 W for efficient parts to 350 W or more for the highest-core-count Xeon and EPYC SKUs. Higher TDP demands more airflow, higher-rated heatsinks, and more datacenter cooling and power capacity per rack.
When configuring servers from China, match the chassis and heatsink to the CPU's TDP, since a high-TDP part in an under-cooled chassis will throttle. Confirm the server ships with the correct performance heatsinks and fan configuration for the SKU, and factor TDP into rack power and cooling budgets.
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- Intel Xeon Scalable generations (1st–5th gen)Intel Xeon Scalable spans five generations: 1st gen Skylake, 2nd gen Cascade Lake, 3rd gen Ice Lake, 4th gen Sapphire Rapids, and 5th gen Emerald Rapids. Each step raised core counts and memory speed, with the shift from DDR4 to DDR5 arriving at the 4th generation.
- AMD EPYC generations (Naples to Genoa/Bergamo)AMD EPYC spans Naples (1st gen), Rome (2nd gen), Milan (3rd gen), and Genoa/Bergamo (4th gen). Rome and Milan use socket SP3 with 8 DDR4 channels and up to 64 cores; Genoa moved to socket SP5 with 12 DDR5 channels, PCIe 5.0, and up to 96 cores.
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