Thermal challenge of high power chip development
An increasingly evident trend in the field of high-performance computing (HPC) is that the power consumption of each chip and rack unit will not stop due to air cooling limitations. Due to the fact that supercomputers and other high-performance systems have reached and in some cases exceeded these limits: power requirements and power density continue to expand.
With the continuous improvement of process nodes, the chip process is approaching its physical limit, and its functions are becoming more and more powerful, which not only brings higher integration but also higher power consumption. Therefore, heat dissipation has become a focus of increasing concern for manufacturers. In addition, for data centers, air cooling has problems in reliability, energy efficiency, noise, and other aspects. Therefore, liquid cooling technology has been widely used in the form of direct to chip cooling in high-speed supercomputers worldwide.
Taking the familiar PC CPU as an example, in the past few years, most flagship products from both Intel and AMD still maintained a power consumption level of 95W. Then, starting from the 9th generation of Core processors, Intel was the first to relax the typical power consumption of CPUs to 125W, and then there were subsequent 10th and 11th generation Core processors with power consumption exceeding 200W. Not to mention in the high-end workstation field, the Xeon 2699V3 in 2014 had a power consumption of only 145W, and by 2017, the default power consumption of 300W for the E5-2699P V4 had emerged. Today, the highest end Xeon 9282 56 core processor has even reached a design power consumption of 400W.
To fully unleash the performance of chips, excellent heat dissipation is essential. At the same time, Intel has released the industry's first open intellectual property immersive liquid cooling solution and reference design for data centers, which is an open, easy to deploy, and scalable overall cooling solution. It will help partners accelerate the deployment and use of Intel solutions to cope with the trend of increasing power and density in data centers, thereby improving operational efficiency.
According to data, central electricity consumption accounts for approximately 1% of global electricity demand and 0.3% of global carbon emissions. Intel aims to accelerate innovation by investing in standardized cooling technology and research and development, which further demonstrates Intel's firm commitment to sustainable technology solutions. Research has shown that immersive cooling that supports energy recovery and reuse can reduce carbon emissions by 45% compared to traditional data centers.
