There's just cooling and there's Cryo Extreme Cooling

Why do we need cooling?

Most things we use on a day-to-day basis use energy in order to work including our cars, lighting, television, dishwashers and washing machines.  All use energy with varying degrees of efficiency.  The green light bulb is all about how inefficient the old tungsten light bulb is versus how efficient the gas filled fluorescent bulb is in comparison.  The reason the tungsten light bulb is so inefficient is because most of the energy it uses doesn’t produce light as was intended in the design, but instead it produces heat and a lot of it.  The average 60W light bulb converts that energy into around 2W of light and the rest as heat, making it about 2% efficient, not good.  A car also converts heat energy from burning fuel (gas, petrol, diesel or chip fat) into reciprocating motion with about 20% efficiency the rest is lost as heat.

The heat energy also has to go somewhere or it will catch fire, melt, disintegrate or otherwise cease to function.  How is heat energy safely dissipated?  With a light bulb it is simply passively radiated out from the glass surface and the infrared light it produces into the air and the things that surround it.  The car dissipates heat by circulating water all around the engine and then through a heat exchanger (radiator) mounted in the moving airflow taking heat out of the water and into the moving air as the car moves along.  In both cases if they didn’t dissipate the waste heat they produce they would fail.

Heat and Electronic Components

It’s a simple law of physics that electronic components generate heat when current passes through them due to the resistance and other current losses (inefficiencies) of the conductors inside them.  This is true of every electrical component from a piece of wire, to a light bulb and a computer processor chip.  Some components even rely on this fact for benefits such as the bar of an electric fire heater which passes current through a coil of resistive wire wrapped around a heat proof, non-combustible ceramic rod to generate heat to warm homes.

However heat generated in active switching devices like the miniscule transistors inside a processor is entirely an unwanted by-product.  More importantly it is a by-product which reduces performance, reduces component life and can lead to unreliable operation and even a fire hazard.  Transistors on microprocessors are now so small (32nm) you could get around 25 of them underneath the area occupied by a single E.Coli bacteria cell (2 µm).  As you can imagine at this size it takes very little excess heat energy to do them permanent damage. 

For those that are curious power dissipated is expressed in the well-known Ohms law formula P = I x V, where P is power dissipated, I is current and V is the voltage drop across the device or component.  In transistors there are other more significant losses that generate waste heat related to switching inefficiencies, instantaneous short circuits and current leakage.  Strictly speaking a lot of current flowing around a computer is in fact AC not DC and so the formula is more complex to take the wave function into account.

A simplistic way to view resistance in a conductor is to see it as a river flowing along a bed and meeting obstacles on its path.  Some of the energy in the river is dissipated in the obstacles it meets as heat.  Better conductors simply have fewer obstacles and therefore generate less wasteful heat.  It’s also possible to make a poor conductor better by metaphorically removing or streamlining the obstacles as the next section discusses.

Superconductivity

It was discovered in 1911 that if the temperature of a conductor is lowered the resistance likewise lowers.  Until at or near absolute zero degrees some conductors (Aluminium and Tin for e.g.) cease to offer any resistance at all and a current could flow endlessly around them with no loss until the end of the universe.  This property is known as superconductivity and can be exploited in electronics (such as in the LHC CERN for the superconductive magnets) to generate ultra efficient circuits. 

What all this means to us boils down to three points:

1.       Cooler electronics work more efficiently, are more stable, can electronically switch faster and have a longer lifetime

2.       The effect is proportional with the cooling; so no matter how little or how much cooling is available it is of some benefit

3.       Conversely, heat makes electronics work more inefficiently, become more unstable, switch slower and have a shorter lifetime

The message is ‘Cool is good, Hot is bad, and the cooler you can go the better’.

What are the benefits of higher performance cooling?

First of all the three points above describe the benefits, but there’s more.  What Ohms law in the earlier section also shows us is that as we increase current or voltage we increase power and hence generate more losses and more waste heat.  Therefore the harder we want to work our electronic components the more heat they are going to generate.  The other aggravating factor is the more heat is generated the more wasteful and inefficient components become.  This is because contrary to super cooling, heating the components causes more electrons to bounce around (technically described as become more ‘excited’) and impede current flow still more.

Clearly if we set out to design a computer from scratch we would set our goals at zero waste, zero heat output and maximum efficiency.  Like everything else in physics this is an impossible goal but we can go some way to improve things towards that goal.  However the average desktop PC or server is not designed this way at all.  They are designed to work in suboptimal environments, tolerate heat, humidity, dust, poor cooling, inadequate power, poor support components, poor mains power quality etc.

Cryo servers and desktops are designed to provide the hard working electronics with the best possible working environment.  As a consequence we are able to coax significantly better, more reliable, more stable operation out of standardised components than would otherwise be possible.  In addition having more performance means a longer useful life and reduced obsolescence in the business environment this means you can increase your return on investment as the lifecycle of equipment can be significantly extended.

How is Cryo PC cooling different?

At Cryo PC we have looked at the science of cooling from a molecular level all the way up to fluid dynamics and the optimum way of configuring air flow and water flow through systems.  Not content with the theoretical optimums we then spend a lot of time in R&D testing out the best combinations of pumps, fans, radiators, thermal interface material (TIM), tubing, water blocks, heatsinks and chassis to ensure we get the best out of each configuration.

So taking each element of the cooling system in turn let’s see how we do things differently to most others on the market today: