Beyond water cooling. (Was Re: Peltier devices for cooling)

[Magnus Danielson]

From: "Jeff Brown" <guitaricon at abac.com>
Subject: Re: Beyond water cooling. (Was Re: Peltier devices for cooling)
Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 16:32:28 -0800

> You have to purge the box with a nice, moisture free gas - like bottled
> nitrogen maybe - to avoid frost.
> 
> S'nother problem. Mechanical deformations with temperature. CD and HD drives
> go out of tolerance when the get very far from 70 deg F.
> Even crystal oscilators (i.e.; CPU clock) detune somewhat.

Actually, for telecommunication curcuits will crystal oscillators detune alot.
You have to use AT or SC cuts, ovens etc. to overcome the troubles.

>  BTW, I used to work on a huge mainframe computer that was water cooled -
> and all discreet transistors.
> The IBM 360/95 designed by Seymor Cray!

What? I know Seymor spent his days at CDC and made revolutionary computers
there, but I never knew he did work for IBM.

I assume the 360/95 ran the transistor in ECL like mode - which actually means
running them in linear mode. If they run in ECL similar mode you would have
a huge power consumption even for discrete transistors while it makes sence for
acheiving high speed.

Late relatives to the 360/95 have huge aluminium blocks with 11 x 11 big chips
and watercooling.

Cheers,
Magnus