Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by aeternum 11 days ago
Thermal dissipation scales quartically with T, that's about as graceful as you can get from a physics POV, very few things scale at that rate.

COTs GPUs throttle at about 90-100C but that's because they have plastic parts and solder that melts. Those are relatively easy to eliminate.

We haven't tried much to scale up operating temp.

1 comments

Apple tried the damnedest at that during their intel era. Silicon gets exponentially leakier at higher temperatures, and that will outpace quadratic growth easily.

(Electronics that works at 200C do exist, but they're not gonna meet a modern smartphone's specs, let alone a datacenter)

>Apple tried the damnedest at that during their intel era.

The story I heard was intel failed to deliver on die shrinks that were supposed to increase thermal efficiency. The fan also had poor routing and basically did nothing.

Apple was clearly not at the top of their game for that design, nor would you expect them to be as the decision was likely already made to move to apple silicon.