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What makes this time different? I've literally heard this is coming to datacenter for 20 YEARS and it hasn't yet. Liquids like mineral oil, etc to be the cool
by alberth 5y ago
What makes this time different?
I've literally heard this is coming to datacenter for 20 YEARS and it hasn't yet.
Liquids like mineral oil, etc to be the cooling agent yet it never gains measured adoption.
And with so much of servers now being centrally managed by just a few major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, etc) - unless you can break into those few accounts - how will this time be any different than the past?
From 2003: https://www.hitachi.com/New/cnews/E/2003/0217/index.html https://www.hitachi.com/New/cnews/E/2003/0217/index.html
- kllrnohj 5y ago> Liquids like mineral oil, etc to be the cooling agent yet it never gains measured adoption. I've never seen a serious attempt to do mineral oil cooling outside of funny gag setups. It was never really pitched as a future of cooling. There's other attempts at other liquids for submersion cooling, but that always seems like a bit of a stretch. Beyond that, liquid cooling has taken over. That Hitachi post, for example, seems to be about AIOs which are now very common on desktops with the AIO market exploding over the last ~5 years. Nearly every laptop also employs a form of "liquid cooling" these days with either heatpipes or vapor chambers. As for "what makes this time different" for the datacenter, well heat density continues to rise. >100 CPU cores per 2U rack are trivial to achieve now, and more are readily plausible. GPU accelerators are also more common than ever, and are pushing staggering power draws (like the 8x 400W NVIDIA A100 in a single 4U chasis the article talks about). You can keep spending more power on fans, but there's diminishing returns there not to mention the power consumption of the fans themselves becomes non-trivial.