Slashdot Log In
Google Demands Higher Chip Temps From Intel
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Oct 15, 2008 09:53 AM
from the because-they-can dept.
from the because-they-can dept.
JagsLive writes "When purchasing server processors directly from Intel, Google has insisted on a guarantee that the chips can operate at temperatures five degrees centigrade higher than their standard qualification, according to a former Google employee. This allowed the search giant to maintain higher temperatures within its data centers, the ex-employee says, and save millions of dollars each year in cooling costs."
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Is this possible? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is this possible? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't Intel run into physical limitations
Google is most likely getting the best chips out of Intel's standard production. It's akin to sorting out the best bananas at the grocery store. This sort of privilege happens when you buy enough products from a supplier.
If they were demanding much more than 5 degrees then I would say they are getting custom made chips, but I don't think that's the case.
Parent
Re:Is this possible? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Is this possible? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Is this possible? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Is this possible? (Score:5, Informative)
What was even weirder was the i487SX. This was a i486DX with an extra pin. If you had a i486SX system and wanted a FPU you bought the i487SX and plugged it in. Then during boot the i486SX was disabled and the i487SX was used for everything.
Parent
Re:Is this possible? (Score:5, Funny)
Intel's 486SX line was just a 486 (later renamed the 486DX) where the FPU didn't work.
Mod parent +5.0000000018623, Informative
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is this possible? (Score:4, Interesting)
WI'm surprised Google isn't considering moving some of its data centres to Arctic locations where you get cool temperatures year-round.
There is no reason to be surprised. It is cheaper to not move the data center to where it is colder and just make all upgraded hardware use the new chips. Google's budget calls for hardware upgrades already. Upgrading to CPUs with higher temp tolerances would mean they pay the same $X-thousand for the box they would anyway and simply turn the thermostat up.
A net savings.
Parent
Re:Is this possible? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm surprised Google isn't considering moving some of its data centres to Arctic locations where you get cool temperatures year-round.
Don't kid yourself. They probably have. But then, who did you get to work at what would probably be a very remote location?
Additionally, such remote locations may suffer from not enough bandwidth and/or electricity.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You know, they wouldn't have to go that far. I'm in Colorado, if they put a data center in one of the higher mountain towns I imagine they could significantly reduce their costs.
I guess the other thing they could look at is using a heat exchanger and use that excess heat for hot water heating or something.
Re:Is this possible? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Is this possible? (Score:4, Interesting)
You are correct, or it may not cook correctly at all at the lower temperature even with more time. For example, if you want to boil rice in Guatemala City, you have to sautee it first.
Damn Slashdot's broken Unicode support. There should be an accent in there.
Parent
Re:Is this possible? (Score:5, Interesting)
Two words: "Free Cooling"
The greater the difference between your data centre's output air temperature and whatever passive external cooling system you are pumping it though, the more heat you can dump at zero cost. That's monetary cost as well as the cost to the environment through the energy "wasted" in HVAC systems and the like. Google has a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness; the ratio of power input to power acutally used for powering production systems) approaching 1.2 vs typical values of around 2.5-3.0 - Microsoft is around 2.75 as I recall - so they are clearly doing something right.
Parent
Re:Is this possible? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is this possible? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm surprised Google isn't considering moving some of its data centres to Arctic locations where you get cool temperatures year-round.
Oh yeah! And completely melt the ice cap.
Parent
Re:Is this possible? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you had say, a town sized data centre installation, it would probably have about the same effect as a smallish and partially active volcano, of which there are many in northern latitudes. Pretty much nothing apart from local effects, which is, in spite of the green crazies rantings, not too bad, not compared to the alternatives.
What you wouldn't have is as much need for additional power to cool, which of course saves the pollution caused by its generation. You should bear in mind that the colder parts of the Earth are being far more seriously effected by polutants in the atmosphere then by anything which is just warmer than its surroundings.
As for why I said green crazies. Well if they hadn't been so all fired determined to put governments off nuclear power, we'd have that instead of all these coal burning plants. Now we have massive pollution problems and a truly gigantic cost for building all those nuclear plants in a shorter time, instead of gradually over the last three or four decades.
Parent
Re:Is this possible? (Score:4, Funny)
Right. Those polar bears, if given the chance, would rip you to shreds, eat your body and then climb into the oh-so-warm data center to hunker down for hibernation.
My brother was a sysadmin in Alaska and a polar bear did exactly that, you insensitive clod.
Parent
Re:Is this possible? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't Intel run into physical limitations that simply don't allow chips to run at that low a temperature? I'm surprised Google isn't considering moving some of its data centres to Arctic locations where you get cool temperatures year-round.
Are you serious? Neither the Arctic nor the Antarctic is well known for reliable power or fast Internet connections.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Wouldn't Intel run into physical limitations that simply don't allow chips to run at that low a temperature? I'm surprised Google isn't considering moving some of its data centres to Arctic locations where you get cool temperatures year-round. We've seen reports of appealing places like that on Slashdot before. (Of course, that would just be a short-term fix before we move the Earth to a farther orbit around the sun to avoid suffocating in our own waste heat like the Puppeteers in Niven's Ringworld [amazon.com] ).
I doubt anything physical is being done. Intel is very conservative in setting maximum operating temperatures. They're probably just promising Google that they'll cover those operated 5 C hotter under their warranty. If anything is actually being done to the hardware it's probably just altering the temp at which throttling occurs.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's going to be far cheaper to build radiator fins extending into space than to move the earth's orbit, barring some innovative invention in the orbit moving department. Also, orbit moving has the downside of reducing the solar flux, which will be bad for our solar energy efforts.
Re:No one mentions a more obvious approach. (Score:4, Insightful)
That means you'd need to make up for the lack of processing power with additional CPUs, which would mean more CPUs to cool.
Parent
Underclocking if you're poor? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you don't have the clout of a Google-sized organization to buy higher-rated chips from Intel, I wonder if you can basically achieve the same thing by underclocking. An underclocked chip will run cooler, but I don't know if it'll run more stably at higher temps, although I think it would.
Does anyone have any experience with doing this?
I think it'd be interesting to see whether the cost savings in power and cooling is offset by the cost of the performance losses.
Re:Underclocking if you're poor? (Score:4, Informative)
In the past, I've under-clocked primarily for noise benefits. Lower clock->lower temp->slower fam RPM->lower dbSPL.
Parent
Waste Heat reclamation (Score:5, Funny)
When in college, I heated my crappy little schack by putting 150W bulbs in every light. It was like my own little Easy-Bake oven.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The place was all electric. An incandescent bulb compares favorably to many space heaters in terms of V->heat efficiency, and you get light as a bonus.
WTF? Lawyers as engineers, not so much (Score:4, Informative)
This sounds like a scenario where lawyers are trying to act as engineers. That works about as well as you might expect.
There are these engineering things, amusingly called "Schmoo plots", that map out a chip's operating envelope of voltage versus speed versus temperature. From those an engineer can forsee how hot you can run a chip before its rise and fall time margins start to get marginal.
There is very little Intel can do to stretch thing by another 5 degrees. It's not something that can be imposed by fiat. Intel engineers have already juggled all the variables to come up with the best performance possible. SOMETHING is going to have to give. Either the chips will have to be selected and graded for speed, lowering the overall envelope for the chips everyone else gets, or they'll have to fudge some other parameters, hoping nobody will notice, or worse yet they'll tweak some variable right to the edge of raggedness, resulting in worse reliability down the road.
Lawyers and accountants generally don't know you can't have everything. let's hope the engineers educate them.
Re:WTF? Lawyers as engineers, not so much (Score:5, Insightful)
Odds are this is being driven by a data-center engineering team, who are looking at the cost savings of running their data center 5 degrees hotter.
You don't get what you don't ask for.
Intel will do exactly as much engineering as necessary to keep their target market up, and no more.
If the market wants chips that operate 5 degrees hotter.. the engineers will do their job and see if it can be done. Intel will charge a premium for this.
That's business.
Parent
Are they saving MILLIONS? (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of the power supply systems for my servers, which are HP G3-5 systems of various U sizes, tend to waste more power as temperature goes up.
This has nothing to do with CPU's though. It is the power supplies on the machines. As temperature goes up, efficiency goes down. At around 80 degrees I noticed a significant larger draw on the power supply with my amp meter.
I had a gaming system with two ATI 4870's and the 800 Watt power supply would crash my machine if I did not run the air conditioner and keep the room at 70 degrees after some fairly long Supreme Commander runs.
I noticed that the amperage would go up, and the power output would go down as temperature would go up.
I have not conducted any experiments in a lab setting with this stuff, but from experience, jacking the temperature up usually makes power supplies work harder and makes them less efficient.
-gc
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Traditional 120-many voltage DC power supplies certaily suffer from lesser efficiency at higher temperatures. Running two 4870s on a single 800w power supply probably isn't a good idea, especially if you have a high-powered CPU to go with them. Most quality power supplies will be rated lower than their maximum output to allow for temperature concerns.
These things said, google uses custom power supplies and systems that only run on 12v. These power supplies may be easier to generate in quality batches, bu
But heat also affects... (Score:3, Interesting)
Higher operating temp (Score:4, Informative)
There are two issues with higher operating temp.
One is that you get less drive current from your transistors, so you get less performance (which everyone seems to understand), but this is usually a fairly small effect for 5 degree C.
The _big_ deal with 5 degree C would be electromigration in interconnect metal, which goes up very quickly with temperature. So the difference in failure rates might be quite large.
If there was any deal at all, it's likely that the Intel engineers tried to remove some conservatism from their temperature estimates to see if they could squeeze out 5 degrees from the thermal budget, or perhaps information on the workload itself to get Intel to "bless" the higher data center temperature.
Re:Environmental impact (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really.
No matter how cool the chips run they will put out heat. If you have two chips that run at X and use Y watts you will save power if you can run them a little hotter and use less power for cooling.
Parent
Re:Environmental impact (Score:4, Interesting)
Pragmatically, if they can't run cool, then it's more efficient to run them hot than to spend more energy actively cooling them.
Parent
Re:Environmental impact (Score:5, Funny)
And ideally, I'd come home to find Alyson Hannigan oiled up and duct taped to my bed
You know you're pathetic when they're even unwilling in your fantasies.
Parent
Re:Environmental impact (Score:5, Insightful)
And ideally, I'd come home to find Alyson Hannigan oiled up and duct taped to my bed
You know you're pathetic when they're even unwilling in your fantasies.
You're assuming everyone prefers them willing.
Parent
Re:Environmental impact (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure what your getting at - if by doing this they are saving millions in cooling expense, they are certainly using less energy. What is "going green" if it isn't energy conservation? The fact that the conservation comes from less work for their AC units rather than efficient little processors is immaterial.
Don't expect any company to do things because its right - but good companies will find win-win situations where they cut costs and do things to "Go Green".
Parent
But they pass it off to someone else (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but way I see this is:
Intel isn't arbitrarily going, "man, we could make chips that run ok 5 degrees hotter, but we're gonna piss everyone off by demanding more cooling. Just because we can." Most likely Intel is already doing the best it can, and getting a bunch of chips which vary in how good they are. And they're getting the same bunch of chips regardless of whether Google demands higher temps or not.
Google just gets a cherry-picked bunch, but the average over Intel's production is still the same. Hence everyone else is getting a worse selection. They what remains after Google took the best.
It's a zero-sum game. The total load on the planet is the same. The same total bunch of chips exits Intel's fabs. On the total, no energy was conserved.
So Google's "going green" is at the cost of making everyone else less "green". They can willy-wave about how energy efficient they are, by simply dumping the difference on someone else.
That's not "going green", that's a predatory approach. Your computers could require on the average an extra 0.5W in cooling, so Google can willy-wave that theirs uses 1W less. They just dumped their costs and their "eco burden" to someone else.
It's akin to me willy-waving that I'm so green and produce less garbage than you... by dumping some of my garbage in random other people's garbage bins across the town. Yay, I'm so green now, you all can start worshipping me. Well, no, on the total the same amount of garbage being produced, I just dumped it and the related costs on other people. That's not going green, that's being a predator.
I can see why a business might want to cut their own costs, and not care about yours. That's, after all, the whole "invisible hand" theory. But let me repeat it: on the whole no energy was conserved. They just passed off some of their cooling costs (energy _and_ money) to someone else.
Parent
Re:But they pass it off to someone else (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:But they pass it off to someone else (Score:4, Interesting)
Google's chips will be running full throttle/full temp 24/7
Is there any documentation for this?
I seriously find it hard to believe that Google has every processor they own running 24/7 at 100% utilization. Other than the computation problems like SETI and protein folding, most problems are I/O bound, and I would think that the stuff Google does would involve a lot of I/O.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
you miss the point entirely. Google wants Intel's processors to operate properly at a higher temperature than currently spec'd that will allow Google to use less cooling. They want the processors to tolerate more heat, not generate more heat. This means Intel will have to make the processors slightly more beefy, but how much does that really cost across millions of units once the design work is done, a few bucks per processor tops.
Google pays dozens of dollars a MONTH to cool each processor. Intel making
Re:But they pass it off to someone else - WRONG (Score:5, Insightful)
>> So Google's "going green" is at the cost of making everyone else less "green". They can willy-wave about how energy efficient they are, by simply dumping the difference on someone else.
The difference is that Google is going to actively exploit the ability of those hand-picked CPU's to run hotter. Chances are that the users who would have otherwise received those chips would not reap any energy savings from the capabilities.
At a minimum, Google is contributing here by forcing a vendor to differentiate chips that have a capability of running hotter from ones that don't. No matter who uses that capability, it's a benefit to the planet (versus the alternatives at least).
MadCow.
Parent
Re:Environmental impact (Score:4, Insightful)
The amount of energy you need to use to cool that stuff is quite significant. And, in case you haven't realized it, generating cool air also create more warm air, it's just not in the data center. It's usually vented right outside.
If the chips could run hotter, they'd have to use less energy to cool the data center, and generate less waste heat from that very cooling in the first place.
I'm not convinced that what they're asking for isn't a good idea.
Cheers
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, but which is easier: making the chips more efficient, or allowing them to run a little hotter without melting?
I honestly don't know. My first thought is that efficiency is harder than durability, but that's pulled completely out of my backside.
I still think they're right in asserting that if they could handle a little more heat, then data centers would spend less energy trying to cool them to their operating rang
Re:Not too surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
"Guarantee us a higher temp CPU or we will switch to AMD...and tell everyone about it."
That's not really how the negotiation goes in this type of situation where there are two major supplier choices (AMD and Intel) and Google is a relatively small customer when compared with Dell, HP, IBM, etc.
In all likelihood, the negotiation is more of a partnership where both parties work together to create value. Google says, "We buy thousands upon thousands of your chips, but we also pay millions of dollars annually to cool them. We'd be willing to pay little premium and lock in more volume if you can help us save money by increasing the temperature inside our data centers." Google has done the math and comes prepared with knowledge of how much those specs can save them and forecast of chip need of the next 12-18 months, and the two work together to create value. For example, Google might offer to allow endorsements (as they did with Dell for their Google appliances) in exchange for favorable pricing and specifications.
The "do this or I'll switch" tactic only works well when there are many suppliers and products are relatively undifferentiated, like SDRAM or fan motors.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I suspect that, with negotiation to set the correct balance of pricing, warranty, access to handp
Re:higher chip temps??? (Score:5, Insightful)
You would be forgiven for thinking it makes more sense to for Google to insist that the chips produce less heat, rather than that they will still operate in extreme temperatures, since the majority of the cooling cost come from dissipating the chip heat from the enclosed space. But hey, it's Google, they do things a bit different.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:good. (Score:4, Insightful)
What? American businesses like saving money almost as much as they like making it. It's environmentalism is not as a big motivator as profit, at least in the US. Make being efficient profitable long term, and some businesses will do it. Make it profitable short term and businesses will fall over one another to do it.
Parent