[HN Gopher] Intel plans immersion lab to chill its power-hungry ...
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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?
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