[HN Gopher] Intel plans immersion lab to chill its power-hungry ... ___________________________________________________________________ Intel plans immersion lab to chill its power-hungry chips Author : rntn Score : 41 points Date : 2022-05-20 15:28 UTC (2 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.theregister.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com) | azinman2 wrote: | Shouldn't they instead figure out how to run cooler and with less | power in general? That's where it seems everyone else is going... | booi wrote: | I need... more powahhh... | | No but seriously why don't they build a 128-core atom server. | That's really all anybody wants. I don't need the fastest most | immersed cpu ever, just a bunch of decent ones at 30W or less. | astrange wrote: | That'd be a pretty unbalanced architecture - may use less | rack space than 128 servers, but with only one servers' worth | of IO, network, PSUs, it'd be less reliable and maybe not | even faster. | matja wrote: | AMD's plan with EPYC Zen 4 "Bergamo", with up to 128 Zen 4c | cores. | tyrfing wrote: | 128 cores at 30 watts isn't something I've seen anyone | planning. What's more likely is 128 cores at 300-400+ watts, | and scaling from there is most likely to increase power usage | and core counts. Bergamo (AMD), Graviton (AWS), Sierra Forest | (Intel), Grace (NVIDIA) are all going for that. | | 30 watts is low power mobile and "edge" compute. | tadfisher wrote: | That was Larrabee/Xeon Phi, was it not? Discontinued for lack | of sales. | sseagull wrote: | That's basically what I thought. However, IIRC they were | marketed more towards high-performance computing (with | avx-512). | | They were an uncomfortable middle ground though, between | normal CPUs and GPUs. My benchmarks showed that there | wasn't much of an advantage over 20-ish normal xeon cores | (for my HPC workloads). | | (Memory is a little fuzzy - that was 4-6 years ago). | glowingly wrote: | While not exactly what you are looking for, Intel Snow | Ridge is a continuation of their Atom-based (next to | their line of Core-based) networking processors. 8-24 | cores. | | https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/ | pro... | | Though, unless if you 100% need X86, there is the Ampere | Altra 128 core Cortex-N1 chip. | icegreentea2 wrote: | Intel (and everyone else) do work on improving compute | efficiency. | | But as the article points out, if 40% of your DC's power | consumption is in cooling, then you'd be foolish not to target | that slice. | | Liquid and immersion cooling allows higher power density, which | all things being equal (I know there's a lot of heavy lifting | being done by this...) will be preferred. Why distribute your | components over a rack if you could fit it into a single 4U | board? Why distribute your components over an aisle if you | could fit it into a rack? | lumost wrote: | The other advantage of power density is that it creates | stronger convection currents. Whereas data centers have | traditionally been actively cooled, it's not unreasonable to | imagine open air dcs with air channels to support convection. | walrus01 wrote: | it's sort of been done, though there are still a lot of | active fans to move the hot air. | | https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=ch | i... | voldacar wrote: | There is only so much computation you can do per watt on | current process nodes. To increase our computation per chip, | which is the goal, we need to increase the amount of watts we | consume per chip. The goal should be to make more powerful | processors, not ones that do the same with less power. | temac wrote: | > we need to increase the amount of watts we consume per | chip. | | Not sure we need that, except in niches. At scale you often | want at least _some_ efficiency, which is certainly not max | TDP per core (because the best efficiency point is with lower | frequencies and higher width, not the max freq you can | achieve). So remains the question of large number of cores, | but at some point the area of silicon also goes stupid high. | And you can put multiple packages, _without_ sacrificing | overall system density too much, and without departing from | simpler, and probably lower TCO pollution. | | For small systems it depends, but you actually often have | even more limited thermal budget, except again in niches if | you are ready to tolerate the drawbacks (stupid power req it | even becomes hard to have just a few machines on a basic | electrical network in standard homes or offices, high noise | under load, obviously high TDP so heating up a lot). But you | have less space constraints so if you really want absurd | systems you already can. | | So do we really need to e.g. double or triple the | (electrical/thermal) power density at scale? Do we need 2 kW | chips? Do we need to sacrifice the efficiency now, and | increase the nominal consumption now, instead of waiting just | a few years for node improvements? (And I could even ask: do | we really need that much increase of processing power, | shouldn't we start to optimise for the total ecological cost | instead? and I've not tried to do some prospective in that | area but _maybe_ this would mean slowing down the processing | power growth...) | jabl wrote: | Can't say I'm terribly excited about another massive scale usage | of forever chemicals, aka flourocarbons. Didn't Intel get the | memo, we're trying to reduce usage of these (see e.g. the EU | F-gas regulations) not increase. | | There's a coolant that's widely used, non-toxic, environmentally | benign, cheap, abundant and non-flammable. Yeah, water. So it's | not dielectric so needs some engineering. But humanity has a | decent track record of building systems with pipes, hoses, heat | exchangers and so forth. Same can't be said for cleaning up | Superfund sites. | tremon wrote: | Fresh (potable) water is going to be a precious resource too, | and salt water is probably out of the question for its | corrosiveness. So I'm not sure replacing fluorocarbons with | water will be any better. Aren't there other liquids we can | explore? | antisthenes wrote: | > Same can't be said for cleaning up Superfund sites. | | It's a pretty huge leap to go from "closed loop CFC cooling | system for a computer" to "superfund sites". | | What am I missing? If we're building a system with pipes and | heat exchangers, why can't the coolant be a low-impact CFC | rather than water? It's not a system where you just vent those | cooling liquids in the atmosphere. | BenoitP wrote: | Some of these CFC are almost eternal compounds. They are so | stable that no natural light frequency from the sun can break | them apart. | | Sulfur hexafluoride, used in high voltage circuit breakers, | has a half-life of 3200 years, has a global warming potential | 22800 times that of CO2. | | So you don't want to vent them, but any accident/leak can be | considered a catastrophe. | | That's just the physics of it: highly dielectric + stable | often makes for a big greenhouse gas offender. | ece wrote: | What is the maximum performance % difference between optimizing | for perf/$ and perf/watt? Sure, there are wafer scale chips now, | but the TDP for a phone is still ~5W watts, average laptops have | gone from ~15 to ~30W, and desktops from ~300-600W+. I suppose | with Zen 4, there might actually be an apples to apples | comparison baring ISA and uncore differences. If ADL is anything | to go by I imagine performance will be within ~15% of each other, | but with a ~30% price difference if you care about a more | efficient and cooler running chip. Sure the efficiency gains add | up, but so do the performance gains on the other side. | wmf wrote: | _What is the maximum performance % difference between | optimizing for perf /$ and perf/watt?_ | | Alder Lake and M1 Pro are good demonstrations of those two | approaches. | tlb wrote: | It can be a lot. Speculation requires executing operations | before you're sure they'll be needed, which can double or | triple power draw in order to increase instruction-level | parallelism. And all the machinery needed to enable | speculation, like branch predictors, draws power too. | | This graph shows a factor of 100 between the highest-performing | and most-efficient systems: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt#Examples | shrubble wrote: | I remember reading with surprise that the Motorola 68040 CPU, | which was competing with the Intel 486, could have run hotter but | at a faster coock speed -- but Motorola didn't want to specify | the use of a heat sink. Seems like quite a change! | wincy wrote: | Uhh, I think you made a typo that made your post quite phallic. | aj7 wrote: | Tik tok is covered with these videos. I saw one with an entire | server rack in a tank. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTdnJ8Yco/?k=1 | LegitShady wrote: | LTT had their mineral oil pc videos...7 years ago | eternityforest wrote: | I wonder what other options there are for cooling. | | What's wrong with water and cooling blocks? I'm sure they could | develop some quick connect hardware, paired with sensors and | valves, so that any leaks could be auto-stopped. | | You could build the connectors such that pressing and holding the | release button causes the whole loop to drain by suction, for | near zero dripping as long as you wait a few seconds first. | [deleted] | chroem- wrote: | This is why I think silicon carbide based chips are going to be a | huge deal: you can run them hot enough that you can actually run | a heat engine off of the chip's waste heat to recuperate some of | the electricity you spent on computation. Now if only I could | figure out how to invest in companies developing this | technology... | picture wrote: | Doesn't silicon carbide have unusual properties for making | digital circuits with? SiC diodes have forward voltages higher | than regular Si, for example. And additionally, I'm not sure if | you can get the same performance on SiC at super high | temperature, as even the metalization need to be specialized to | handle the heat without too much resistive voltage drop, etc | AtlasBarfed wrote: | Wasn't the original research push for CVD diamonds for CPUs so | you could run them 10x hotter? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-05-22 23:00 UTC)