Google Demands Higher Chip Temps From Intel

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."

Comments

Re:Is this possible?

[Ngarrang]

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.

Re:Is this possible?

[TheRaven64]

It's not just the celerons, its most CPUs. A modern CPU is quite big and contains a lot of components that aren't essential to the operation of the chip. If you disable these, you have a slightly less good chip without the engineering cost of designing a entirely new die layout. AMD takes this to extremes. Their Opterons have 4 cores, three hypertransport connections and a load of cache. If there is a manufacturing flaw in the cache, they are sold as a model with less cache. If it's in the cores, then they are sold as three, two, or single core chips. If it's in the HT controllers then they only support 2- or 4-way multichip configurations. Intel's 486SX line was just a 486 (later renamed the 486DX) where the FPU didn't work.

Re:Is this possible?

[mzs]

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.