The recent revelations of Intel representatives about the layout of Ponte Vecchio computing accelerators made it possible to understand what crystals they will consist of and where they will be produced, but they did not say anything about the appearance of the finished products in combination with the cooling system. Intel documentation contains mentions of using liquid cooling.

Japanese bloggers got to the description of some technical characteristics of Ponte Vecchio on the Intel website, and although they are available only to developers, brief annotations to these documents allow us to determine that the finished accelerators of this family will have the OAM performance familiar from servers and supercomputers. The TDP level will reach 600W, for this reason Intel directly indicates the need to use liquid cooling.

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The fact is that the standard cooling system of the OAM module implies the presence of an air cooler of the tower layout, through the radiators of which air is driven by the server case fans. This design allows you to remove up to 450 W of heat, and with a value of 600 W, liquid cooling is indispensable. It is still difficult to understand whether Intel will offer Ponte Vecchio accelerators in a more economical air-cooled version, but liquid-cooled ones are definitely provided for the older model.

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For a supercomputer, this is not such a problem, since the design of the corresponding server systems is always adapted to the customer’s requirements. In the supercomputer Aurora, for example, each node with two Intel Xeon processors from the Sapphire Rapids family will coexist with six Ponte Vecchio accelerators. With this arrangement, it is not difficult to implement liquid cooling.