Keep in mind, this is not about a patent - it is a patent application. The USPTO has done nothing with it except charge MS their filing fees. They may disallow all the claims.
Regarding all the obvious patents that we do see, as with most everything else - blame the friggin lawyers... I, and most people that I know who work at larger companies, are not supposed to look at patents (at least at work). As it was explained to me, if a company infringes on a patent it pays damages. If a company knowingly infringes, it pays 3x damages. So company lawyers don't want to let the engineers do anything that would give the appearance to a jury that they knew about prior art. So engineers aren't allowed to look for prior art and neither are the patent attorneys. But managers hear something that sounds novel, so they tell their managers to file a disclosure. Companies don't trust engineers to judge each other's work, so they have some director-level decide which patent disclosures go forward - and we all know how incompetent they generally are.... The only person left in the whole process who is responsible for determining if there is prior art is the poor patent examinar who is swamped with idiotic patent applications...
My understanding is that no one has ever documented lead leaching out of a tin-lead solder into ground water. However, silver - which is commonly used in lead-free solders will leach out and is somewhere around 100x (at least) more toxic than the lead anyway. The concept of lead-free solder having anything to do with safety or environmentalism is downright silly...
As someone who makes their living figuring out how to move heat from A to B (in avionics, not datacenters), this comment makes my head hurt for a number of reasons... First off, as others have pointed out, liquid cooling in data centers is a reality and folks like IBM have worked on liquid cooilng for decades. Due to many of the reasons already mentioned, everyone avoids liquid cooling as long as they can and a number of technologies have helped on this. For example, the transition from Bipolar to CMOS around the time I finished grad school put a lot of thermal engineers out of work for a while. However, liquid cooling is used in plenty of places - Cray has done it for a long time on their supercomputers (not on the latest one - at least not for local cooling), F-22 & F-35 have liquid cooling for their avionics (for weight reduction), nuclear reactors (using liquid metal), etc.
Every thermal conference held in the last 5 years seems to have had at least one session on data center cooling and most of the work is on implementing some aspect of liqud cooling. The electricity required for data center cooling is now on the order of 30-40% of the total power (don't quote me on that - I'm actually thinking it is higher than that, but as I said I don't work in that market). Air cooling is great for simplicity, but it has limits that we are fast approaching. The simple methods for air cooling involve just dumping hot air into the room and once you do that and are using the A/C on twice as much warm air as the the hot air that you would otherwise be cooling without the mixing, your cooling power requirements shoot up considerably.
Liquid cooling has two potential benefits (as well as the numerous challenges already described). As people have pointed out, the thermal conductivity of water is much higher than air (k = 0.6 vs. 0.027 W/m^2K). This is important because it higher local cooling (the convection coefficient is ~20x higher). More importantly, the volumetric heat capacity of water is massive compared to air. The temperature rise (in C)of cooling air is ~(8*W dissipated)/(lb/hr of cooling air). So when you are dissipating MW of power and trying to keep the electronics no more than 20-40C above ambient, you need (literally) tons of air. Water is about 4x better in specific heat and about 1000x more dense, so you reduce the volumetric flow rates by ~4000x and get more effective heat transfer at both the electronics and heat exchanger ends (so they can be smaller). Pumps can generally be much more efficient than fans and the amount of pumping power for a 100% device scales with the density * volumetric flow rate^(1.5) [assuming that I am doing the math in my head correctly...].
If either the price of electricity or the heat dissipation levels in data centers continue to go up (fairly safe bets...), you will see increasing use of liquid cooling in that application. Keeping things leak free, and other related maintenance issues, and dealing with legacy architecures seem to be the biggest hurdles.
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Keep in mind, this is not about a patent - it is a patent application. The USPTO has done nothing with it except charge MS their filing fees. They may disallow all the claims. Regarding all the obvious patents that we do see, as with most everything else - blame the friggin lawyers... I, and most people that I know who work at larger companies, are not supposed to look at patents (at least at work). As it was explained to me, if a company infringes on a patent it pays damages. If a company knowingly infringes, it pays 3x damages. So company lawyers don't want to let the engineers do anything that would give the appearance to a jury that they knew about prior art. So engineers aren't allowed to look for prior art and neither are the patent attorneys. But managers hear something that sounds novel, so they tell their managers to file a disclosure. Companies don't trust engineers to judge each other's work, so they have some director-level decide which patent disclosures go forward - and we all know how incompetent they generally are.... The only person left in the whole process who is responsible for determining if there is prior art is the poor patent examinar who is swamped with idiotic patent applications...
My understanding is that no one has ever documented lead leaching out of a tin-lead solder into ground water. However, silver - which is commonly used in lead-free solders will leach out and is somewhere around 100x (at least) more toxic than the lead anyway. The concept of lead-free solder having anything to do with safety or environmentalism is downright silly...
As someone who makes their living figuring out how to move heat from A to B (in avionics, not datacenters), this comment makes my head hurt for a number of reasons... First off, as others have pointed out, liquid cooling in data centers is a reality and folks like IBM have worked on liquid cooilng for decades. Due to many of the reasons already mentioned, everyone avoids liquid cooling as long as they can and a number of technologies have helped on this. For example, the transition from Bipolar to CMOS around the time I finished grad school put a lot of thermal engineers out of work for a while. However, liquid cooling is used in plenty of places - Cray has done it for a long time on their supercomputers (not on the latest one - at least not for local cooling), F-22 & F-35 have liquid cooling for their avionics (for weight reduction), nuclear reactors (using liquid metal), etc. Every thermal conference held in the last 5 years seems to have had at least one session on data center cooling and most of the work is on implementing some aspect of liqud cooling. The electricity required for data center cooling is now on the order of 30-40% of the total power (don't quote me on that - I'm actually thinking it is higher than that, but as I said I don't work in that market). Air cooling is great for simplicity, but it has limits that we are fast approaching. The simple methods for air cooling involve just dumping hot air into the room and once you do that and are using the A/C on twice as much warm air as the the hot air that you would otherwise be cooling without the mixing, your cooling power requirements shoot up considerably. Liquid cooling has two potential benefits (as well as the numerous challenges already described). As people have pointed out, the thermal conductivity of water is much higher than air (k = 0.6 vs. 0.027 W/m^2K). This is important because it higher local cooling (the convection coefficient is ~20x higher). More importantly, the volumetric heat capacity of water is massive compared to air. The temperature rise (in C)of cooling air is ~(8*W dissipated)/(lb/hr of cooling air). So when you are dissipating MW of power and trying to keep the electronics no more than 20-40C above ambient, you need (literally) tons of air. Water is about 4x better in specific heat and about 1000x more dense, so you reduce the volumetric flow rates by ~4000x and get more effective heat transfer at both the electronics and heat exchanger ends (so they can be smaller). Pumps can generally be much more efficient than fans and the amount of pumping power for a 100% device scales with the density * volumetric flow rate^(1.5) [assuming that I am doing the math in my head correctly...]. If either the price of electricity or the heat dissipation levels in data centers continue to go up (fairly safe bets...), you will see increasing use of liquid cooling in that application. Keeping things leak free, and other related maintenance issues, and dealing with legacy architecures seem to be the biggest hurdles.