A Novel Cost-Efficient High-Performance Aluminum Cold Plate Solution for Liquid Cooling System

Abstract

As cloud computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications are evolving with high performance computing, CPU’s power and heat flux are both rising along. Traditional air-cooling solution is running into serious heat dissipation challenge and is becoming a bottleneck of system thermal solution. Thus, liquid cooling cold plate design emerges and gradually becomes one of the mainstream heat dissipation solutions due its excellent cooling performance. However, since legacy cold plates are based on copper material, cold plate designs are not widely adopted due to its high cost and heavy weight. In this paper, a novel aluminum liquid cooling cold plate is introduced, it adopts innovative internal structure design and effectively improves heat dissipation performance of aluminum cold plate. In the meantime, compatibility between aluminum cold plate and coolant is researched. An accelerated test model is proposed and verified by experiments. Test result shows that the new aluminum liquid cooling cold plate can support Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) with up to 700W Thermal Design Power (TDP), with thermal resistance below 0.033 ℃ / w @ 2lpm and longtime reliably. Moreover, cost of the aluminum cold plate is 30% lower comparing to legacy copper cold plate design with comparable performance.