This wouldn't make the room any cooler, though, as the total energy used by the computers is the same. It would just dissipate the heat in the air, rather than keep it on the chips.
I feel like that might be embedding some questionable assumptions, such as:
1. That CPU computing work completed is directly proportional to joules of heat emitted.
2. That stymied active cooling measures don't themselves generate heat, such as all the fan motors spinning at 100% and the AC/DC conversion to power them.
3. That even if performance was improved by removing thermal-throttling, demand would still push everything to run at full-tilt rather than allowing some machines to idle.
I don't think GP was suggesting it would. The bit about the server room being hot as hell was just to illustrate that these machines were running in a very hot environment without proper cooling.
As I understand it, hot CPUs are less efficient CPUs. Could have an effect on temperature.
Unless the work to be done is unlimited, all else being equal, hopefully a well functioning system puts out less heat to do X amount of work than a poorly running system.
Small desktop-class fans, sure. But when you're talking 1U or 2U rack-mounted systems with high speed (>10k RPM) counter-rotating fans, they often suck tens of watts each. And usually in those systems there are at least four, sometimes six, often eight. So it's reasonable to think that bringing down overall compute load over hundreds of systems would cut out a significant, measureable chunk of energy usage in just moving air.
One would think the fans wouldn't work as hard, but then again server fans might blast on full regardless. It's amazing that none of the machines / components overheated and failed.
