Power Management

In data centers packed with high-performance AI GPUs, why is liquid cooling spreading alongside air cooling?

  1. ALiquid cooling doubles a chip's performance limit
  2. BAir cooling has been banned by law
  3. CPower per chip and per rack has grown so high that air can no longer carry the heat away adequately
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Answer: C. Power per chip and per rack has grown so high that air can no longer carry the heat away adequately

A single AI GPU consumes several hundred watts to over 1 kW, and racks full of them produce tens of kilowatts to over 100 kW of heat. Air carries little heat per volume, so even stronger fans can no longer keep up. Liquids such as water carry thousands of times more heat per volume, so cold plates on chips with circulating liquid are coming into use. It also reduces the power spent on cooling.

  • A. The performance limit itself does not double.
  • B. It has not been banned.
  • C. Correct. Liquids carry far more heat than air.
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More Power Management questions

  1. Which describes PUE, a metric of data center power efficiency?
  2. Why do smartphone SoCs play video using dedicated video decoder circuits rather than the general-purpose CPU?
  3. Why does an OS slightly shift and align the wake-up times of many programs' timers (timer coalescing)?
  4. What is the idea behind the tickless kernel used in Linux and other OSes?
  5. What is the Arm WFI (Wait For Interrupt) instruction used for?