Heat loads of data processing equipment continue to increase at a rapid rate. This increasing heat load has been documented by a Thermal Management Consortium of 17 companies [1] as shown in Figure 1. Also shown in this figure are measured heat fluxes (based on product footprint) of some recent product announcements. The most recent shows a rack dissipating 28,500 watts, … [Read more...]
Cooling of a Flat TV Monitor
Thermal design in the consumer electronics business is about dealing with two difficult challenges: The first is to fulfill, and if possible surpass, customer expectations. The second is to do this in ever shortening design cycles. After a main initial use of flat displays as computer monitors, larger flat display screens are now emerging for video purposes: the Flat TV. … [Read more...]
Power Density Challenges Of Next Generation Telecommunication Networks
Despite the current downturn in the telecommunications industry, data transfer (i.e. network traffic) is continuing to grow at a 100% rate [1]. It is already projected that network traffic demand will reach tens of Tb/s in a couple of years from now (see predicted traffic demands from telecommunications analysts Ryan, Hankin & Kent, Figure 1). At the same time, network … [Read more...]
Numerical Modeling and Experimental Verification of High-density Servers
High-density hardware and software are developed as part of an initiative to greatly increase data center compute densities. Concept systems presented here are based on the Intel® Itanium™ processor family and are designed for a 1U rack-mount form factor. The current dual-processor system concept is targeted at the front-end server market (e.g., web hosting and mail routing), … [Read more...]
The Challenge of Operating Computers at Ultra-low Temperatures
Although the potential for low temperature enhancement of CMOS circuit performance has been recognized for some time, circuit scaling (proportionally reducing the size of the circuit) has been the preferred method of achieving higher performance. But as minimum feature size passed well into the sub-micron and now into the nanometer region, this route to higher performance has … [Read more...]
