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Nvidia announced a new series of A100 data centre GPUs. Most strikingly, the GPUs are cooled with fluids. This should become the standard for future Nvidia data center GPUs.

Nvidia A100 data centers GPUs are often used for AI and machine learning. The newest introductions feature liquid cooling. This should give the GPUs the same performance while lowering power consumption. According to Nvidia, liquid cooling increases power efficiency by up to 33 percent from air-cooled A100 GPUs.

Another advantage is that less water evaporates during the cooling process. Air cooling systems remove heat from servers by evaporating large amounts of water. Liquid cooling systems use less water and recycle most water used.

Less space required

Additionally, liquid-based cooling reduces the space required in data centers. The systems are more compact than their predecessors. This way, more GPUs can be placed in a server chassis. The new models require a single PCIe slot. Air-cooled models typically require two slots.

Nvidia expects the first liquid-cooled A100 GPUs to be available this summer. The technology will be extended to the recent H100 flagship GPU. Nvidia is not the first manufacturer to focus on liquid cooling for processors and GPUs. Intel recently announced a similar plan.

Grace SuperChip

Additionally, Nvidia announced a number of other hardware updates. Several new manufacturers are going to market servers based on Nvidia’s Grace CPU SuperChip and Grace Hopper SuperChip.

These servers are based on four reference designs. Two of the designs use the Grace SuperChip, a CPU and a high speed interconnect chip. The other two are based on the Grace Hopper SuperChip, a Grace CPU combined with a GPU. The designs are suited for AI applications and HPC workloads.

Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin

Nvidia also provided details on the upcoming Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin ecosystem. These compact computing modules are suited for running AI models in edge environments. Many Arm-based processors are combined with a GPU.

There are about 30 hardware manufacturers that will supply systems based on this technology. These include servers, edge appliances, industrial PCs and circuit boards for new hardware products. Release dates are unknown.