What do overclockers and supercomputers have in common?

Q: Have you ever wondered what overclockers, supercomputers and mainframes have in common?

A: They often use exotic water cooling techniques to cool their CPUs and GPUs.

Enthusiasts and engineers both know that cooling is vital. Cooler chips run faster, and have less leakage power. As a result, good thermal management raises performance and dramatically lowers power by reducing the temperature of the CPU or GPU.

In this article, we explore the theory and practice behind cooling, performance and power consumption. Japan's new Kei supercomputer is the fastest in the world - Fujitsu's design relies on water cooling and our analysis demonstrates that thermal management can increase CPU performance/watt by 20% and possibly more.

New technologies such as 3D integration are essential to Moore's Law and semiconductor scaling, which places increasing emphasis on cooling techniques - making it an even more important area going forward. Read more at RealWorldTech.