In the latest episode of Uptime with DCK, we take a detailed look at liquid cooling with Dattatri Mattur, director of hardware engineering at Cisco.

With upcoming server CPUs expected to consume around 400W of power, GPUs already consuming more than that (Nvidia’s H100 requires ~700W per board), and with terabytes of memory per server, the cutting-edge IT workloads of the future will be almost impossible to cool with air alone.

In this podcast, we discuss thermal design points of modern processors, the cooling requirements of edge computing, and the impact of new technologies on power consumption.

We also look at some of the barriers facing the wider deployment of liquid cooling, and the enduring importance of server fans.

“This is going to take some time,” Mattur told Data Center Knowledge. “This is not an overnight, forklift change to the entire data center.”