Nvidia adds liquid cooling in its GPUs for data centres

New Delhi, May 24 (IANS) Graphics chip-maker Nvidia has announced to add liquid cooling in its GPUs for more sustainable and efficient computing experience for its data centre customers.

The company announced at the Computex 2022' event late on Monday that it's introducing a liquid-cooled version of its A100 graphics card that will consume 30 per cent less power than the air-cooled version.

Born in the mainframe era, liquid cooling is maturing in the age of AI.

It's now widely used inside the world's fastest supercomputers in a modern form called direct-chip cooling.

"Liquid cooling is the next step in accelerated computing for NVIDIA GPUs that already deliver up to 20x better energy efficiency on AI inference and high performance computing jobs than CPUs," the company said in a statement.

The operators aim to eliminate chillers that evaporate millions of gallons a water a year to cool the air inside data centres.

Liquid cooling promises systems that recycle small amounts of fluids in closed systems focused on key hot spots.

"Liquid-cooled data centres can pack twice as much computing into the same space, too. That's because the A100 GPUs use just one PCIe slot; air-cooled A100 GPUs fill two," said the company.

At least a dozen system makers plan to incorporate these GPUs into their offerings later this year, including ASUS, Foxconn Industrial Internet, GIGABYTE, H3C, Inspur, Inventec, Nettrix, QCT, Supermicro, Wiwynn and xFusion.

The technology is not limited to data centres, said Nvidia, and cars and other systems need it to cool high-performance systems embedded inside confined spaces.

For fast adoption, today's liquid-cooled GPUs deliver the same performance for less energy.

In the future, Nvidia expects these cards will provide an option of getting more performance for the same energy.