Compaq ProLiant 6500 Compaq ProLiant 7000 Server Technology - Page 6

ECG078/0698 TECHNOLOGY BRIEF (cont.) ... Thermal Design Compaq has designed an innovative thermal cooling solution for the Pentium II Xeon processor that contributes to increased system reliability and future performance scalability to 8-way architectures. Heat pipes transfer heat away from the Slot 2 cartridge thermal plate to cooling fins mounted atop the cartridge (Figure 1). Pentium II Xeon Processor Cartridge Heat Fins Heat Pipes Figure 1: Heat pipes and fins for the Pentium II Xeon processor cartridge. This top-mounted position and the direction of the cooling fins are advantageous in two important ways. First, this design cools efficiently regardless of the direction of air flow (vertical or horizontal). Therefore, the same Slot 2 cartridge and heat sink combination used in the ProLiant 7000 4-way configuration can also be used in future 8-way configurations by simply reorienting the processors. Second, because the heat fins are top mounted, the redundant processor power module can be placed in its optimal position, next to the processor, to maintain short signal trace lengths across the 100-MHz system bus (Figure 2). The resulting improvements to power supply regulation and system bus signal quality increase system reliability. Moreover, the smaller spacing between processor sockets makes possible future upgrades to 8-way Pentium II Xeon architectures using the same chassis design. 6