Practice question · Multiple choice
A data centre spends nearly as much energy on cooling as on computing. Which physical fact makes that unavoidable?
Hints
- Energy is conserved. Ask where the electricity goes once the computation is done.
- The chip does no mechanical work and stores nothing. What is left?
Show the answer
A. Essentially all energy delivered to a chip ends up as heat
Why
A chip performs no mechanical work and accumulates no energy, so virtually everything in comes out as heat, computing is electric heating that happens to calculate. This is why data centres are sited near cold water or cheap power, and why waste heat is increasingly piped into district heating.
Practise Electric Charge and Fields
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