Any ideas how to cool SP5 socket processors like EPYC Turin which dissipate 0.5-0.6 kW ? Air coolers already do not work there. Water coolers like Silverstone360 SP5 designed for Genoa EPYC processors with TDP below 400W can not keep up with this type of power with temperaturess to reach 80 C. And coming EPYC Venice processors with future SP7 socket expected to drain even larger power. Looks like this crazy power race will never stop.
As a quick solution - is it possible to upgrade current water coolers to work in parallel? Computer boxes like CORSAIR 9000D have double or even triple and quadruple space for coolers
first of all, it's a watts-per-area type of issue, where you have a small area dissipating a ton of heat. The limiting factor here is the material it needs to transfer through, like copper or thermal paste. If you reduce those layers or improve the thermal interface, you can get a lot more oomph out of your cooling solution (
here a link). Another approach is through chip design/manufacturing: If you remove the amount of silicon (which has a bad heat transfer characteristic) between the parts that produce the heat and the heatsink, you will improve heat dissipation. This should result in a smaller difference between the hottest parts/junctions and the coldest parts, which allows for the entire chip to run a bit hotter overall. The next step then would be direct cooling, either direct or indirect.
There was an article about this on STH a few weeks ago. While this is a water cooling solution, you could make something work with a vapor chamber design as well in place of the heatspreader we got currently. That's more of a packaging technology challenge, but could produce socket'able CPUs close to the design we have right now. all of the latter solutions would get us comfortably into the 1kw+ territory in terms of potential cooling, and it's more an issue of reducing the costs. You can get really good and efficient designs as well. It just stands in a direct conflict with peak performance due to physics/manufacturing capabilities, since you can only push design so far. It's not a crazy power race. It's a crazy performance race, and efficiency for compute is rapidly rising because of it. We don't want it to stop, it's a good thing! And in terms of cooling, we're at a fraction of what's
possible. We're just balancing it against what's
economical.
