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Thermal design power (GPU) over time

Vendor cooling-design figure. Defined differently by each vendor and across eras, so it is reported but never turned into a multiplier.

Device scope
gpu
Method
Rated power
Plotted in
watt

Chart

4 figures from 4 machines, spanning 2010 to 2022. The lowest thermal design power here is 180 W (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080, 2016) and the highest is 700 W (NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU (SXM), 2022). The two are not divided into a multiple: thermal design power is not a metric where a ratio means anything. The figures are plotted in W. Points use the release date of the machine the figure belongs to. The table below lists absent figures with their recorded reasons.

Data

One row per figure, in date order. Figures with no value stay in the table. The chart omits them because an unpublished figure is not a low one.

provisional A figure marked provisional is recorded but not accepted: its evidence is unsettled. It may rely on one source, an unconfirmed announcement, or a digit read from a damaged scan. The reason appears under the figure. The catalog shows the figure but never uses it in a multiplier. How records are judged.

Machine Released Figure Confidence Sources
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 NVIDIA Fermi (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580) November 2010 243 W Vendor-rated provisional
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 NVIDIA GP104 (GeForce GTX 1080) May 2016 180 W Vendor-rated
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti NVIDIA Turing (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti) September 2018 250 W Vendor-rated
NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU (SXM) NVIDIA H100 (SXM) 2022 700 W Vendor-rated
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra NVIDIA GeForce 6 (NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra) April 2004 unknown No numeric graphics-card or board-power rating appears in the recovered qualifying NVIDIA documents. not plotted —
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX NVIDIA Tesla (NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX) November 2006 unknown Neither qualifying source supplies a numeric GeForce 8800 GTX board-power or thermal-design rating. not plotted —

Why this chart holds one group only

Every point on a chart is implicitly compared with every other point on it. This chart uses one comparability group: one metric, one device scope, one method . There is no chart of all clock frequencies over time because they are not one quantity.

Points use the release date of the machine a figure belongs to, including figures recorded against a part. A release date applies only to a machine that shipped. What this metric measures.