• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
• /
• v.16 no.7
• /
• pp.1-11
• /
• 2011

Many researchers have studied on the methods to improve the processor performance. However, high integrated semiconductor technology for improving the processor performance causes many problems such as battery life, high power density, hotspot, etc. Especially, as hotspot has critical impact on the reliability of chip, thermal problems should be considered together with performance and power consumption when designing high-performance processors. To alleviate the thermal problems of processors, there have been various researches. In the past, mechanical cooling methods have been used to control the temperature of processors. However, up-to-date microprocessors causes severe thermal problems, resulting in increased cooling cost. Therefore, recent studies have focused on architecture-level thermal-aware design techniques than mechanical cooling methods. Even though architecture-level thermal-aware design techniques are efficient for reducing the temperature of processors, they cause performance degradation inevitably. Therefore, if the mechanical cooling methods can manage the thermal problems of processors efficiently, the performance can be improved by reducing the performance degradation due to architecture-level thermal-aware design techniques such as dynamic thermal management. In this paper, we analyze the cooling efficiency of high-performance multicore processors according to mechanical cooling methods. According to our experiments using air cooler and liquid cooler, the liquid cooler consumes more power than the air cooler whereas it reduces the temperature more efficiently. Especially, the cost for reducing $1^{\circ}C$ is varied by the environments. Therefore, if the mechanical cooling methods can be used appropriately, the temperature of high-performance processors can be managed more efficiently.