AI drives the thermal revolution, and 3D-VC unlocks the highlight moment!
Driven by the generative AI craze triggered by ChatGPT and the high computing power requirements for autonomous driving and big data model applications, the AI server market has maintained rapid growth. IDC data shows that the global AI server market will reach US$15.6 billion in 2021, and the global AI server market will reach US$31.8 billion in 2025.
The power of the new generation of AI servers is increasing step by step, and it is approaching the limit of air cooling and heat dissipation. AI server leader NVIDIA, in addition to actively introducing liquid cooling solutions on its latest platform, also configures 3D-VC (3D vapor chamber) cooling on some AI GPU chips.
Each NVIDIA AI server is generally equipped with 4 to 8 GPUs, and the power of each chip is as high as 300W to 700W, which requires very high thermal solutions, thus prompting the air cooling solution to shift from traditional flat VC to 3D-VC.
3D-VC is different from traditional vapor chambers. In the traditional design, the vapor chamber is located on the top of the chip, transferring heat to multiple heat pipes in the secondary assembly, and then the heat pipes transfer the heat to the fin group. Due to the separate design of the vapor chamber and heat pipe, the heat transfer distance increases and the thermal resistance increases.
3D-VC extends the heat pipe design into the vapor chamber body. The vacuum chamber of the vapor chamber and the heat pipe are connected into one cavity. The working liquid return capillary structure of the heat pipe is also integrated with the connection of the vapor chamber, so the heat is evenly distributed. The heat energy from the plate is transferred more quickly to the heat pipe and then to the fin pack.
Compared with traditional vapor chambers, 3D-VC can dissipate more heat. In this way, it can handle more than 300W of power under a smaller module size design without causing an excessive increase in server size.
In addition, another important application of 3D-VC is in high-end gaming graphics cards, whose heat dissipation capabilities can cover NVIDIA RTX40 series or AMD RX70 series up to 400W.
As mainstream graphics card brands such as MSI increasingly favor 3D-VC cooling solutions, 3D-VC has welcomed two major applications, AI servers and high-end graphics cards.
MSI demonstrated their DynaVC vapor chamber technology at this year's Computex, which utilizes a 3D vapor chamber and combines it with folded heat pipes, rather than integrating the heat pipes separately. This technology is said to help shorten heat transfer distances and facilitate more direct transfer of heat to the fluid in the 3D-VC cavity.
