Intel plans immersion lab to chill its power-hungry chips

Sulfur hexafluoride, used in high voltage circuit breakers, has a half-life of 3200 years, has a global warming potential 22800 times that of CO2.

So you don't want to vent them, but any accident/leak can be considered a catastrophe.

That's just the physics of it: highly dielectric + stable often makes for a big greenhouse gas offender.

30 watts is low power mobile and "edge" compute.

They keep designing chips that use less and less per core. Why not cram as many cores as possible into a single server? Lower density means more wasted material, and once you go below 2GHz you're not saving very much power any more.

Part of that, I think, was lack of parallelism in applications: in order to fully take advantage of those cores, you need to have a nearly-embarrassingly-parallel problem. Otherwise, you're not going to get the performance that you'd expect (but you'll get power efficiency!).

The fact of the matter is, that's not "all anybody wants."

Not sure we need that, except in niches. At scale you often want at least some efficiency, which is certainly not max TDP per core (because the best efficiency point is with lower frequencies and higher width, not the max freq you can achieve). So remains the question of large number of cores, but at some point the area of silicon also goes stupid high. And you can put multiple packages, without sacrificing overall system density too much, and without departing from simpler, and probably lower TCO pollution.

For small systems it depends, but you actually often have even more limited thermal budget, except again in niches if you are ready to tolerate the drawbacks (stupid power req it even becomes hard to have just a few machines on a basic electrical network in standard homes or offices, high noise under load, obviously high TDP so heating up a lot). But you have less space constraints so if you really want absurd systems you already can.

So do we really need to e.g. double or triple the (electrical/thermal) power density at scale? Do we need 2 kW chips? Do we need to sacrifice the efficiency now, and increase the nominal consumption now, instead of waiting just a few years for node improvements? (And I could even ask: do we really need that much increase of processing power, shouldn't we start to optimise for the total ecological cost instead? and I've not tried to do some prospective in that area but maybe this would mean slowing down the processing power growth...)

Linus Torvalds said that ARM needs to be widespread on the desktop, because you need a critical mass of developers targeting ARM. ARM server vendors don't want that critical mass, they want special deals with a handful of big companies which is obviously doomed to fail.

There's no pressure to push anything off it's connector, and in the event of anything failing and disconnecting in a major way, the loop starts draining the other way by atmospheric pressure.

Water pumps are pretty cheap, you could have triple redundant pumps per rack for an irrelevant cost.

Air pumps are also cheap. You could even enclose your connections to heat blocks in a second layer of slight negative pressure, that would both contain any drop-an-hour leaks that somehow happened, and funnel it to a humidity sensor.

If they use anything like Fluorinert, I'm pretty sure a whole rack of this kind of tech could cost less than a single gallon of that stuff.

I'm actually kind of surprised consumer water cooling setups aren't like this. It might be a pretty fun project, and you could probably use 3D printed parts depending on how much you trust the active controls.