back to article What Nvidia's Blackwell efficiency gains mean for DC operators

Hotter and more power-hungry CPUs and GPUs were already causing headaches for datacenter operators before Nvidia unveiled its 1,200W Blackwell GPUs at GTC last week. Over the past year, datacenter operators and colocation providers have expand support for high-density deployments through the use of rear-door heat exchangers ( …

  1. Neil Barnes Silver badge

    Liquid cooled or not

    History suggests that efficiency gains are never interpreted as needing less power to do the same amount of work, but in doing more work (worthwhile or not) for the same power.

    1. cyberdemon Silver badge
      Holmes

      Re: Liquid cooled or not

      Or in this case, doing apparently 5x more "work" for double the power..

    2. Snake Silver badge

      Re: Liquid cooled or not

      I wonder when the fab companies will start considering the need to make the substrate larger than the design's required footprint, in order to gain additional cooling surface at a (relatively) modest cost. They can't continue to push the designs into a smaller, yet hotter, package and expect cooling ability, especially in a dense server farm, to easily, continuously and economically keep up. Yes, yes, that means more motherboard real estate to hold that larger die package but conversely you gain the greater surface area needed to actually support that die's abilities to burn kWh like it's Steven Tyler on a cocaine trip.

  2. NeilPost

    Centreparc’s and Salad

    There is the common ground to utilise the waste heat for other purposes - much talked about, little delivered.

    Perhaps a DC on-site at Centerparc’s/Alton Towers to warm their indoor aqua-park or some of the Glasshouse salad growers (or vertical farms) need to pitch up on every DC roof (intermingling with the often absent Solar Panels)..

    After all Amazon needs ‘Prime Salad’ of tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuces, and cucumbers for their Fresh, Whole Foods or Morrison’s customers. Organic Cucumbers … powered by AWS ;-)

    Cooling DC’s and at the same time as heating greenhouses is obvious carbon-footprint madness.

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