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Originally Posted by Cathar
I don't foresee a world where 150W CPU's can ever be mainstream, and the cooling limitations are not the only reasons why.
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Sounds an awful lot like "640K is enough for anyone"
Looking at the big picture, the electrical usage over the last century has increased at an incredible rate - 50 years ago the combined electical usage for the US was around 200 billion kilowatthours... now its closer to 4 trillion. Moore's law keeps being extended by some new discovery, but one of the downsides of adding more and more transistors is more and more heat. Shifting to smaller processes has helped that, but eventually air cooling as we know it is going to have to go. Whether it is replaced by nano-lightning bolts, or synthetic diamond heatspreaders, or by phase change systems, or by fully sealed water cooling systems is yet to be seen.
#rotor raises a good point with the reliability issue - actually, its my major concern with water cooling for workstations and small servers - yes, when implemented correctly in one large solution (like Cray) it works well. But when you have lots of servers or workstations, the chances of a pump failure or leak increase to near certainty, even with competent installation. If a HSF dies on a modern CPU, the system will shut down or warn you of overheating and usually there will be no damage and minimum downtime. If a pump fails, you have to drain the system, replace the pump, fill and bleed, and then start it up again - takes a good bit longer than an aircooling replacement. If you get a leak... well, quite possibly, goodbye expensive server and lots of downtime.