Impact of Data Center Cooling Technology to Effectiveness of Turbo-Mode

Abstract

The importance of cooling and energy efficiency is getting more and more important in data centers. The liquid cooling technology for CPUs is well known for its energy efficiency. In addition, it provides performance improvement by enriching the opportunity for turbo mode, which temporarily boost the clock frequency when the temperature and power consumption conditions stay below predefined thresholds. However, not all CPUs show improved performance when liquid cooling is applied. In this paper, we experimentally reveal that liquid cooling has different effects on performance improvement depending on the design of the cooling device and the thermal and power consumption characteristics of the processor. Through a series of experiments, we reveal that, in this paper, the higher the TDP, the greater the performance improvement obtainable through liquid cooling. We also identify that distributed temperature sensing (DTS) margin is the main cause of performance improvement of turbo mode. Intel's 200Watt CPU, in particular, has improved performance by 4.7% due to liquid cooling. © 2020 IEEE.