From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Fri Feb 15 2002 - 11:23:30 MST
Eugene Leitl wrote:
>
> On Fri, 15 Feb 2002, Mike Lorrey wrote:
>
> > I'm wondering why chip companies are not looking at building MEMS
> > cooling systems into chips, and why they are not already designing
> > cooling ports into the chips. A number of evenly spaced venturi ports
>
> For the same reason they don't design memory-CPU blocks bonded with heat
> dissipation + networking, all in a handy pluggable module. Customers
> apparently don't want it. AMD is losing credibility with the user base
> right now, though, because it doesn't offer thermal protection. A naked
> AMD CPU would self-destruct in less than a second.
Odd. I've got three CPU chips from an old IBM mainframe (the whole CPU
was actually made up of I think 20 or 36 separate chips), each of which
had a cemented on heatsink. (I was thinking of bedding each in epoxy as
paperweights). You'd think that these guys would have improved things
since the old big blue days...
>
> > across the chip face for the fan to draw air through should provide a
> > significant increase in cooling. As chip designs get thicker, this will
> > be a very necessary design feature.
>
> Copper and diamond heat spreaders should be there quite soon, and advent
> of liquid cooling is unavoidable. Voltage and structure shrink still gives
> us some headway, but current designs are rapidly getting uncomfortably
> hot. Asynchronous designs and power saving should do better, and even
> reversible logic in semiconductors, eventually.
>
> Latter is a must for computronium, of course.
How quickly would the human brain cook if it didn't have liquid cooling?
The problem with the chips using conventional heatsinks is that the
place where the most heat is produced, the center of the chip, is the
furthest from the area of highest heatsink airflow. Doing the following
port scheme would optimize airflow:
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Although chip makers could conceivably configure the port arrangements
to reflect the corporate or brand/model logo.
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