[Beowulf] CPUs are not hot enough

[Cristian Tibirna]

On Friday 01 April 2005 18:04, David Mathog wrote:

> Here's where the irony comes in - the CPUs aren't hot enough.
> room temp is around 300K and the CPUs are at most another
> 50K above that, giving a pathetic Carnot efficiency.  Imagine if the
> chips were designed to run really, really, really hot.  For
> instance, 600. At that point the heat engine could run at
> about 50% efficiency and one could recover about half
> the power that went in. 

Shouldn't the other 50% go somewhere too? You'd still need cooling. And much 
more so, at that, unless you also replace all plastics in your machine with 
highly termoresistive resins, thus driving the cost of your recuperated 
energy really really high. Or?

-- 
Cristian Tibirna				(418) 656-2131 / 4340
  Laval University - Québec, CAN ... http://www.giref.ulaval.ca/~ctibirna
  Research professional - GIREF ... ctibirna at giref.ulaval.ca