At 600W TDP, Intel Ponte Vecchio accelerators will require liquid cooling
The recent revelations of Intel representatives about Ponte Vecchio computing accelerators’ layout made it possible to understand what crystals they will consist of and where they will be produced. Still, they did not say anything about the finished products’ appearance in combination with the cooling system. Intel documentation contains mentions of using liquid cooling.
Japanese bloggers got to the description of some technical characteristics of Ponte Vecchio on the Intel website. Although they are available only to developers, brief annotations to these documents allow us to determine that this family’s finished accelerators will have the OAM performance familiar from servers and supercomputers. The TDP level will reach 600W; for this reason, Intel directly indicates the need to use liquid cooling.
The fact is that the standard cooling system of the OAM module implies the presence of an air cooler of the tower layout, through the radiators of which the server case fans drive air. This design allows you to remove up to 450 W of heat, and with a value of 600 W, liquid cooling is indispensable. It is still difficult to understand whether Intel will offer Ponte Vecchio accelerators in a more economical air-cooled version. Still, liquid-cooled ones are definitely provided for the older model.
For a supercomputer, this is not such a problem since the corresponding server systems’ design is always adapted to the customer’s requirements. For example, in the supercomputer Aurora, each node with two Intel Xeon processors from the Sapphire Rapids family will coexist with six Ponte Vecchio accelerators. With this arrangement, it is not difficult to implement liquid cooling.