There have been discussions about this chip here in the past. Maybe not that particular one but previous versions of it. The whole server if I remember correctly eats some 20KWs of power.
There have been discussions about this chip here in the past. Maybe not that particular one but previous versions of it. The whole server if I remember correctly eats some 20KWs of power.
A first-gen Oxide Computer rack puts out max 15 kW of power, and they manage to do that with air cooling. The liquid-cooled AI racks being used today for training and inference workloads almost certainly have far higher power output than that.
(Bringing liquid cooling to the racks likely has to be one of the biggest challenges with this whole new HPC/AI datacenter infrastructure, so the fact that an aircooled rack can just sit in mostly any ordinary facility is a non-trivial advantage.)
Well for some. Google has been using liquid cooling to racks for decades.
That’s wild. That’s like running 15 indoor heaters at the same time.
20KW? Wow. That's a lot of power. Is that figure per hour?
What do you mean by "per hour"?
Watt is a measure of power, that is a rate: Joule/second, [energy/time]
> The watt (symbol: W) is the unit of power or radiant flux in the International System of Units (SI), equal to 1 joule per second or 1 kg⋅m2⋅s−3.[1][2][3] It is used to quantify the rate of energy transfer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt
If you run it for an hour, yes.
I asked because that's the average power consumption of an average household in the US per day. So, if that figure is per hour, that's equivalent to one household worth of power consumption per hour...which is a lot.
Others clarified the kW versus kWh, but to re-visit the comparison to a household:
One household uses about 30 kWh per day.
20 kW * 24 = 480 kWh per day for the server.
So you're looking at one server (if parent's 20kW number is accurate - I see other sources saying even 25kW) consuming 16 households worth of energy.
For comparison, a hair dryer uses around 1.5 kW of energy, which is just below the rating for most US home electrical circuits. This is something like 13 hair dryers going on full blast.
Which honestly doesn't sound that bad given how many users one server is able to serve.
Consumption of a house per day is measured in kiloWatt-hours (an amount of power like litres of water), not kiloWatts (a flow of power like 1 litre per second of water).
1 Watt = 1 Joule per second.
Thanks!
I think you are confusing KW (kilowatt) with KWH (kilowatt hour).
A KW is a unit of power while a KWH is a unit of energy. Power is a measure of energy transferred in an amount of time, which is why you rate an electronic device’s energy usage using power; it consumes energy over time.
In terms of paying for electricity, you care about the total energy consumed, which is why your electric bill is denominated in KWH, which is the amount of energy used if you use one kilowatt of power for one hour.
You're right, I absolutely was mixing them both. Thanks for clarifying!
It’s 20kW for as long as you can afford the power bill
20 kWh per hour