This moves the energy to the cover of the tank. But then it still has to be removed to another location. So this does not help anything, not compared to setting up in a cold area.

It’s good to see a topic that has been the subject of research and development for a number of years (two-phase cooling) getting into mainstream bulk systems. This technology can improve the operating temperature of the processor chips and increase reliability, but the heat still has to be sunk to either ambient air or water. I expect that the dissipation of the removed heat to ambient air, outside the datacentre, is still a major challenge.

Willem you are incorrect. The rate of heat transfer for a liquid is so many orders of magnitude higher than air, the whole process would be many times more efficient.

This seems to address a couple issues, heat transfers much more efficiently into a liquid than a gas, and changing phase absorbs multiples of what even the liquid would. This will also eliminate dust collecting on and around components and causing local hot spots. Years ago, these liquids were almost always CFCs, I’d imagine they’ve chosen an environmentally friendlier option.

Willem: Good point. I can only assume it is an improvement because it localizes the heat release,and makes keeping the cooled condenser easier to cool. Maybe something like a nearby lake/river would circulate cooling water through the condenser?

> While the natural first choice might be a liquid that runs cold, Microsoft has now done the exact opposite

No, they haven't. Just because a liquid boils doesn't mean it's hot. Here it just means they chose a liquid with a boiling point lower than what we are used to (100°C, water as sea level), as mentioned later in the article (50°C).

Just like @Nohor points out, the title is cheaply sensational. Something that is becoming a bit too common here.

What a pile of stinking garbage!! It's probably nothing more than a stupid publicity stunt coupled to some kind of a tax write off! If you pump any given amount of KW of electricity into a machine that converts that electricity into heat by doing some work, you've converted the electricity into heat, which must then be moved back out into the environment again where it came from! The heat in the evaporated liquid must be drawn off by radiating it away from the vessel to get it to condense back into a liquid again,. How is that stage of the process done, by big fans blowing air across some fins? This is just a variation of the Carnot Cycle. Nothing new to see here, move along, please.

Randy

Cooling utilising nucleate boiling, hence removing heat via latent heat of vapourisation instead of pure conduction, has been used since the 1930s as a cooling method for high performance aero engines.

Well, I guess this will help until we figure out how to build micro-volt nano-circuitry, combined with SSRs, which will obviously require less sinking of heat.