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Comment by soygul | Hacker News Reader

Threadripper 3990X (also 64-core) can draw up to 1000 Watts (!) if you can keep it cooled and let the clock multiplier loose. [1]

I imagine it would be nice to have a mini-AWS at home. Not sure how it would feel like to have a 1K Watt space heater permanently running though.

[1] https://hothardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3990x...

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At that sort of power level one could theoretically capture the heat and cycle it back into the board as electricity. How long before we see a little stirling engine spinning away atop AMD chips?

Those sort of high wattage configurations are only really useful for seeing your system at the top of the benchmarking charts. Nearly everything that scales to 64 cores will scale to multiple machines, at which point you're getting much better performance per watt by adding a machine which doubles performance at double the power than by unlimiting clock speed which gives you a small percentage improvement in performance in exchange for quadruple the power consumption.

The smaller the temperature difference, the worse the efficiency. The linked article said it got up to 85C, if you assume the cold end gets down to 25C, you could only recover 16.753% of the thermal power as useful work, theoretical maximum Carnot cycle.

Just run the whole thing off steam and a boiler. Can you imagine having a whistle too.

Wouldn't that kill cooling speed and thus kill your clock speed?

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