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Comment by RachelF | Hacker News Reader

The "innovation" is that everything is now attached to a watercooled block.

The rest is marketing: The Cray supercomputer were fluid cooled back in the 1980's, the entire board had an inert liquid flowing across it.

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When my grandpa retired from Monsanto chemical back in the 90s, I helped him clean out his office and got a tour of a bunch of stuff.

He showed me their Cray, which had its own dedicated computer room, and they set it up with the coolant pump and fountain unit right in the middle in front of a glass wall facing the hallway so everyone could gawk at it.

The innovation is being able to run the chips at higher temps without ruining them too quickly.

Haven't AMD CPUs been targeting a 95°C limit for 5+ years already? I'd have guessed servers could do 60°C without degrading a whole lot before switching to more power efficient hardware is available.

95˚C is the core temp, not ambient. My parent comment was probably wrong though, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48667527

    > The Cray supercomputer were fluid cooled back in the 1980's, the entire 
    > board had an inert liquid flowing across it.

You can still do this with any computer, by the way: just submerge the entire board in motor oil. Slightly smelly and might make a mess, but absolutely workable.

Mineral oil is the usual substance used, as its clear and non smelling.

Are pretty much all surface mounted components fine with this?

I wanted to waterproof a micro devboard by submerging it in mineral oil. I was worried the board may delaminate or components would turn to goop

Mineral oil is what people use these days, but it is much less funny. In practice, any oil will do, although olive oil is not suggested - smells nice at first, but will break down over time.

> everything is now attached to a watercooled block

Does it increases manufacturing and operational cost of such racks?

My partner lamented the same thing... Cray was doing this 40+ years ago

Bad quality of water clogging the pipes integrated onto the PCBs (thus requiring to replace the PCBs) was said to be what were killing those few USSR Elbrus supercomputer installations.

Cray used Fluorinert, a chlorofluorocarbon. So not exactly a environmentally friendly solution.

That shouldn’t be a problem then given that we don’t care about environmental impacts anymore.

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