Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kash johal who wrote (41609)	11/16/1998 11:53:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575181

<Tench, I believe that you are wrong and this could be significant for the K7. Kryotech currently sell a cryo-cooled Alpha workstation souped up from 500Mhz to 767 Mhz for around $10K.> And how many of those Kryo-Alpha's are sold every year? Very few, I'll bet, which is fine for a low-volume business like Alpha chips. <WRT to reliability of Kryotech's products - I simply don't know but it would seem to me it would be easy to lower clock speed if temp. sensors show abnormal rise. I imagine that's how they do it. There is No RELIABILITY issue running CMOS devices cooler in fact the device reliability improves dramatically over running in a hot environment.> I have a hard time believing that the problem is as simple as adding a high-tech air conditioner right onto the package itself. But this isn't my field of study, so I could be wrong. All I know is that if I were in charge of buying workstations for a particular project, and I needed the fastest performance available, I would still have a hard time trusting Kryotech products to do my heavy-duty calculations. To me as a consumer, Kryotech is still a company which is best suited towards hobbyists. It's a reputation thing; I'm sure you'll understand. Tenchusatsu

To: kash johal who wrote (41609)	11/17/1998 12:34:00 PM
From: Tony Viola	Respond to of 1575181

Kash, >>>There is No RELIABILITY issue running CMOS devices cooler in fact the device reliability improves dramatically over running in a hot environment.<<< It's not about reliability of the CMOS processor, or the other chips being cooled. It's the cooling box itself. My experience with these types of things is that they fail more often than the electronics they are trying to cool. And, they take the whole shebang down while they're at it. You can get leaks, drips, loss of flow and other fun things. One cooler that a spinoff of CDC developed years ago, which was supposed to circulate liquid right over the chip packages, was found to be washing the lids right off the chips. That's extreme, but you get the idea. When you go from convection cooling, to fan cooling, to liquid cooling, rule of thumb is that you increase complexity by an order of magnitude at each change. If someone came out with an Intel based cryo-cooled workstation, I would have the same opinion, FWIW. Tony