Intel's Xeon server and data center processors could soon be cooled by using Liquid Immersion Cooling technologies. The company is currently working closely with Green Revolution Cooling to test and develop such cooling frameworks for different Intel data center customers. For those unaware, Green Revolution Cooling or GRC is a firm that develops immersion cooling and other similar tech for data centers.
In immersion cooling, components are fully submerged in a dielectric thermally conductive liquid in order to cool down the hardware. GRC also says that its current R&D with Intel is also helping it test out such coolants and their effectiveness. Right now, Xeon Scalable CPUs are being used for testing purposes.
Data center customers are willing to adopt this type of cooling as it should improve the overall power usage effectiveness (PUE) of the systems. High-performance computers, servers, among others, continue to become denser due to more and more cores, and cooling them effectively can certainly become a challenge.
Describing this, the GRC press release says:
As more processing power is becoming densely packed into servers to support compute-intensive applications such as artificial intelligence, data center operators globally are striving to increase efficiency while also increasing compute, all within a smaller footprint.
[...] Intel and GRC’s collaboration will also work to ensure that as new fluid formulations enter the market, data centers can be confident these fluids meet standards for safety, material compatibility, and thermal performance.
Below is an example image of what a Liquid Immersion Cooling rack can look like. It is a two-phase system made by Gigabyte and was shown off by the firm at CES 2019.
You can read more about Intel and GRC's venture in the official press release here.
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