How much does power efficiency matter really? I understand it can be a substantial part of operational costs (or maybe the lion's share, I don't know), but would firms even care? Relative to the investment cost of obtaining the hardware to begin with, wouldn't operational costs be relatively insignificant in the medium-term?
Chinese semiconductor thread II
- Thread starter vincent
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It matters but not the way people normally think it does. The problem isn’t with generating enough power but actually cooling the servers so that they remain functional and reliable. I have some industry experience in the matter and you basically have to take all that into consideration when architecting the building for your data center.
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BIWIN Songshan Lake wafer-level advanced packaging and testing project started, expected to be put into production in 2025
According to the "Dongguan Release" public account, the Songshan Lake BIWIN Storage wafer-level packaging and testing project has officially started construction recently and is expected to be fully put into production in 2025.
It is reported that the Songshan Lake BIW Storage Wafer Level Packaging and Testing Project is invested and constructed by Guangdong Xincheng Hanqi Semiconductor Technology Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Shenzhen BIW Storage Technology Co., Ltd. The project land was successfully delisted on May 30 this year. The land area is about 102 acres, with a total investment of 3.09 billion yuan. It focuses on wafer mid-stage manufacturing and testing, high-bandwidth storage memory packaging and testing technology research and development, and provides 12-inch wafer bumping, rewiring processing (RDL) and 2.5D/3D packaging and testing services.
The project mainly builds a wafer-level advanced packaging and testing base, provides a full range of advanced packaging and testing services, and helps Dongguan's integrated circuit industry expand in scale and leap forward in technology. He Han, CEO of BIWIN Storage, said that he is committed to building the project company into a world-class advanced packaging and testing company. According to information, Shenzhen BIWIN was listed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board in December 2022. It specializes in the application research and development and packaging and testing manufacturing of semiconductor memory storage media. It is a national high-tech enterprise and a national-level specialized "little giant" enterprise, and has received strategic investment from the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund Phase II.
Another thing to keep in mind is many data centers track TCO with depreciation, so the initial cost of the hardware is offset by how much they can sell the hardware for later. Many data centers eventually cycle out the hardware and resell it so the true TCO won’t include the full investment cost of the hardware since they will eventually sell it to upgrade.
I do think cooling is the main issue here. These new data centers have very high power requirements. At a certain point, you need some really modern liquid cooling to keep things from overheating. And liquid cooling is just not possible for some older data center. Also, it's unclear to me just what problems liquid cooling will bring to a data center?
Any ideas?
lol, A100 basically has no value now in US data center.
Yeah it’s pretty dependent on the market lol. I suspect in China deprecation will be pretty low since there’s a huge supply shortage but deprecation in the US will be a lot higher.
Liquid cooling adds a whole can of worms because you need to factor in the pipes carrying coolants to the servers, which is a complication air cooled machines don’t have. If you constructed a server farm for air cooled servers converting it to accept liquid cooled servers is difficult to say the least. Might as well as build a new building.
Shenzhen semiconductor equipment manufacturer receives financing for silicon carbide
Tianyancha information shows that Shenzhen Mingchuang Intelligent Equipment Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Mingchuang Intelligent) recently completed its B+ round of financing. The amount of financing was not disclosed, and the investor was Mingde Investment. This is a new round of financing completed by Mingchuang Intelligent after completing its B round of financing in April 2023.Since its establishment in December 2019, Mingchuang Intelligent has completed four rounds of financing, namely the angel round in December 2019, the A round in July 2021, the B round in April 2023 and the B+ round in July this year. Investors include Mingpu Optoelectronics, CITIC Deloitte Investment, Shenzhen Hi-Tech Investment, Shenzhen Xiaohe Investment and other institutions.
According to the official website, Mingchuang Intelligent focuses on precision micromachining and automation solutions for the panel, consumer electronics, lithium battery, semiconductor and other industries. It mainly studies the processing technology and intelligent equipment solutions for materials such as TFT-LCD, OLED, sapphire, glass, ceramics, silicon, silicon carbide, etc., and provides laser cutting, laser engraving, laser micromachining solutions and supporting automation products.
looks like a bunch of new huawei products coming out in September, including Nova 13 and the 3-fold phone. All using Kirin chips. Another sign that 7nm production is sufficient for their needs that they can fully accommodate Huawei mobile demands as well as HPCs from Huawei and still allocate capacity for other AI chip designers
Another example where improvement in semi manufacturing tech further advanced semi tool component tech. DRIE etch enabled Si resonant pressure MEMS sensor, the best pressure sensor in mass production, which is now used in gas MFC, litho lasers and CPM tools to produce even better semiconductors.
This AVIC spinoff became the 3rd company in the world to produce this kind of mems sensor