Data Centers Open Source Silicon

Liquid cooling bubbles up at Open Compute Summit

By Rick Merritt, EETimes
March 15, 2019

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Microsoft and partners released open source RTL for a new data compression scheme, and Intel said another effort may do the same for a security block. The moves mark the first steps into open source silicon from data center giants in the Open Compute Project (OCP).

The projects were indicators of the depth and breadth of work to drive the world’s largest data centers forward. It comes at a time when Moore’s law is slowing and workloads such as deep learning are growing, forcing engineers to pull out all the stops in their quest for performance.

For example, vendors showed a half dozen alternative approaches to cooling fast chips, including immersion baths. With dozens of hot processors and accelerators in the pipeline, one executive said he hopes an OCP committee can draft standards by next year for the area.

More than 3,500 engineers registered for the annual OCP event. The group has 178 members said to spend $2.56 billion a year on data center gear, forecast to rise to nearly $11 billion by 2022

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