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.

▲

jasonwatkinspdx an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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.

▲

3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

▲

frollogaston 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

▲

dietr1ch 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	frollogaston 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		95˚C is the core temp, not ambient. My parent comment was probably wrong though, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48667527

▲

fennec-posix 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

	▲	briandw 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Cray used Fluorinert, a chlorofluorocarbon. So not exactly a environmentally friendly solution.
	▲	trhway 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.