Nvidia introduces A100 and H100 data center GPUs with waterblock
Nvidia has announced plans to release water-cooled versions of its A100 and H100 data center GPUs. According to the company, this variant can save up to 30 percent energy in data centers.
The water-cooled Nvidia cards will be available in PCIe format and will feature a single-slot design. This means they take up less space than the air-cooled variants, among other things. Nvidia’s current PCIe data center cards require two slots each. This should fit twice as many PCIe server cards in a rack.
Nvidia claims that the video cards with water cooling are also more efficient. A data center with such water-cooled cards should use up to 30 percent less power, the company claims. This energy saving must, among other things, result from reduced energy consumption by cooling with water instead of large cooling machines that cool the air in data centers.
Apart from the water block, the GPUs remain unchanged. The tdp and clock speeds remain the same and the cards do not get extra CUDA cores or memory. Nvidia will release an A100 data center GPU with water cooling in the third quarter of this year. An H100 variant with a water block will follow early next year.
The first of these water-cooled server cards are therefore aimed at less power consumption. In the future, Nvidia says it will also use water cooling for extra performance, presumably by increasing the TDPs of those cards compared to the air-cooled variants. Furthermore, Nvidia also comes with water-cooled HGX servers. Those servers contain the more powerful SMX variants of Nvidia’s data center GPUs, which offer higher TDPs, among other things. A water-cooled HGX A100 server is currently already being delivered and a variant with H100 GPUs will follow in the fourth quarter.
Source: Nvidia