Slashdot Mirror
The Not-So-Cool Future
markmcb writes "Researchers at Purdue University and several other universities are looking to start work on a major problem standing in the way of future chip design: heat. The team is proposing a new center to consolidate efforts in finding solutions for the problem that is expected to become a reality within the next 15 years as future chips are expected to produce around 10 times as much heat as today's chips. The new center would work to develop circuits that consume less electricity and couple them with micro cooling devices."
Think about the people up in northern Canada, who need that precious heat! Unless this is some evil conspiracy to kill them off?
My UID is prime... is yours?
What this boils down to is "researches are looking at ways to make cooler chips." Well, duh, haven't they always?
Le français vous intéresse?
I thought the future of processors was going ot be photonic processors. I'm not sure if these will be producing any heat or not.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
I think that the solution to the heat problem will not come with better and more powerful cooling solutions, but rather radically changing how chips are designed and manufactured. The article doesn't contradict this, but I just want to emphasize that. Having some liquid nitrogen cooling unit is not the optimal, or even a good solution.
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
they should look for ways to mass produce cheap diamonds.
Diamonds are about five times better at heat conducting as copper and could thus be used for passive cooling.
See pictures of tits
("ten times as much heat as today's processors")
I don't think that 1kW processors will be practical. Nobody is going to want to pay to run that, and nobody will want a heater running in their room all the time either.
I'd say that they should be looking to limit it to not much more than current figures (100W) - maybe 200W if we are generous. After that it gets silly.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
"Meanwhile, the cloud of electrons would be alternatively attracted to and repelled by adjacent electrodes. Alternating the voltages on the electrodes creates a cooling breeze because the moving cloud stirs the air."
Amazing, Purdue is developing the same technology used in such high tech devices as the Ionic Breeze air purifier.
Not that I claim to have a solution to the problem with overheating processors. But the power consumption of computers are starting to bother me.
I used to want the fastest computer around. But a few things have changed I guess.
First of all computers are starting to be fast enough for most needs.
Secondly, the way I use computers has changed with always on Internet. I never turn my computer off because I want to be able to quickly look something up on the web.
I also have a server that is running 24/7. Most of the time it is idling, but even when it is working I don't need it to be a speed demon.
So it is starting to be really important for me that a computer doesn't use a lot of power. I don't know if it affects my electric bill in a noticeable way, but it feels wrong.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
as other slashdot articles have proposed, future PCs (probably) won't be much more powerfull than today, but rather, like back in the mainframe days, dependend on some supercomputer selling it's processing power.
obviously such a mainframe can use massive parallel processing techniques were cooling is less of an issue.
See pictures of tits
We need to start working on the next generation of gerbil powered chips asap!!
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
The alliance proposed in the article, to me, seems similar to the AIM Alliance of the early 90s. Several companies united in a common goal. I've heard the AIM Alliance failed because competitors united in a common goal remain competitors, and as such tend not to fully disclose "trade secrets," even to further the common goal. If this proposed alliance takes off, I fear it will suffer the same fate as the AIM Alliance.
Raj Against the Machine! http://social-butterfly.appspot.com/
Not a joke.
The future is multi-core / multi-CPU boards where scaling comes from adding more pieces, not making them individually faster.
Yes, chips will always get faster and hopefully cooler, but it's no longer the key to performance.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
When I think of future problems that will happen to hardware, Hardware DRM comes to mind.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Working on the latest generation of computers, its no suprise that the cheaper/generic fans are very noisy trying to turn faster to compensate for the greater cooling requirements.
An efficient and inexpensive cooling solution would be more desireable, IMHO.
Has anyone else experienced the "jet engine" noise comeing from newer systems?
Guess if you make the chip with less need for cooling requirements, we'll solve the puzzle also, however, that may be the more expensive road to the solution of fan noise, no?
Especially for those of us with newer motherboards who want a completely silent system with as few fans as possible
First it was CPUs with cooling and big/slow/no fans and big heatsinks, then PSUs GPUs and now MOBOs. My current custom box (now 14 months old) was built to be silent and I had a hard time settling on a motherboard that was state of the art, stable, and still used a passive heatsink to cool the board chipset fan-free. I finally settled on an Asus P4P800.
I can definately believe heat becoming even more of an issue. For those of us who want power/performance and quiet at the same time, this will become even more of a challenge as time goes on. I for one hope not to rely on expensive and/or complicated cooling devices, like peltier units, water pumps and the like. I hope the focus is on efficient chips that only clock up/power up as they need to, like the pentuim M.
my 2 cents.
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
Whoa that's cool, now it means no more petrol is needed.
If i take out my CPU cooler it reaches about 100'C. Now lets see, 100 x 10 = 1000'C in only 15 years of chip industry. If we manage out to put this heat into work, lets say we can have 'PC + hairdryer' packages or 'PC + free home-heating' winter offers or even 'PC - burn-a-pizza' boxes. Think about it, its only good news.
Funny, -1
Fucking a fat girl is like riding a scooter... it's fun 'til someone sees you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'd like to hear from some engineering types about why we can't use the excess heat from CPUs to do useful work. I know virtually all large-scale methods of generating electricity involve generating large amounts of heat through some process (nuclear reactions, burning coal or oil, etc), using it to create a hot gas, which turns a turbine, generating electricity.
I also have some vague handwaving idea that there are processes for generating electricity that have to do with harnessing temperature differentials, but I really don't know what I'm talking about.
Anyway, why can't we have little gas turbine generators (or some other method) in our machines that reclaim some of this lost energy, instead of wasting it? Seems like the aggregate energy amounts would be pretty large.
Take off all your....um...inefficient circuits! Its getting hot in here, take off all your inefficient circuits!
Using energy creates heat. If they use less energy there is less heat. I think they should ignore the direct problem and fix the indirect problem.
I thenk you need to get a bigger room. the 300W or so your computer uses would hardly be enough to heat a toilet...
See pictures of tits
it's the size.
compare the typical light bulb with the typical wire running through your house. the light bulb gets hot because of the thin wire.
See pictures of tits
Sig response: Actually, yes mine is - thanks for asking!
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
w00t, no more heaters! now we just need a new way to cool my house...
"The microscopic cloud of ionized air then leads to an imbalance of charge in the micro-atmosphere, and lightning results. "
Using lightning to cool a CPU?
Doesn't EMF pose a problem here?
Guess you could shield, but thats counter productive isn't it?
>problem that is expected to become a reality within the next 15 years as future chips are expected to produce around 10 times as much heat as today's chips.
This is bullshit. I am never even considering buying a >>100W CPU for my desktop, certainly not 1000W.
I'd rather see a less fans in my machine, not more.
Looking into heat/area is more reasonable as area will decrease for a while still.
Or perhaps I'm grossly physics-impaired.
What would it take to replace x86 with another chip like Crusoe or MiPS and make it better for desktop PCs?
-jpeg
hello!!! work on that.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
"Mechanical engineers at Purdue have filed patents for ... "
"The patents arose from a research project funded in part by the National Science Foundation."
The idea of getting the NSF funding, (in part), the research that will later lead to mechanical engineers getting the patent would be a great way to make money at the expense of others.
Should not the patent rights be shared among those who funded the project?
This would let you get all the benefits of existing tried-and-tested cooling methods, but would eliminate the bugbears of the chip's casing being an insulator and the possibility of condensation screwing everything up.
A variant on this would be to have the chip stand upright, so that you could have a cooling system on both sides. The pins would need to be on the sides of the chip, then, not on the base.
A second option would be to look at where the heat is coming from. A lot of heat is going to be produced through resistance and the bulk of chips still use aluminum (which has a relatively high resistance) for the interconnects. Copper interconnects would run cooler, and (if anyone can figure out how to do it) silver would be best of all.
A third option is to look at the layout of the chips. I'm not sure exactly how memory chips are organized, but it would seem that the more interleaving you have, the lower the concentration of heat at any given point, so the cooler the chip will run. Similarly for processors, it would seem that the more spaced out a set of identical processing elements are, the better.
A fourth option is to double the width of the inputs to the chips (eg: you'd be looking at 128-bit procrssors) and to allow instructions to work on vectors or matrices. The idea here is that some of the problem is in the overheads of fetching and farming out the work. If you reduce the overheads, by transferring work in bulk, you should reduce the heat generated.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Put three 100W light bulbs in a large cardboard box, and stand by with a fire extinguisher.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
"And as a general rule, RISC processors are more efficient than CISC processors running at the same clock speed"
Where did that "general rule" come from? It's nonsense.
Human brains, being as powerful processors as they are don't run as hot... Therefore as a pc chip doesnt _need_ to either surely?
because I want the G8 to go into Powerbook first when its release. I tired of this whole G5 fiasco
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
It's defiantely the size. Tiny dies concentrate heat and huge transistor counts mean more current draw, you could solve the heat (well really, the COOLING) problem by making chips BIGGER, but then they'd slow down because signals would have to travel longer distances, and power consumption might actualy go UP becuase it'll take more voltage to push signal over longer interconnects. The laws of thermo-dynamics are a bitch.
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
It's the way of the future.
Now we know the real cause of global warming.
There is a major break in Moore's law per core, but they are getting around that with multiple cores. If you have twice as many active devices and you run them at 1 over square-root of 2 times the frequency the power per core will be halved and you get the same computing power. Less frequency reduction gives more computing power. This does help the heating problem by spreading the heat source over a larger area.
Another way to increase the cooling effectiveness is do draw heat out both the top and bottom of the chip. Perhaps the pins could carry heat out. Perhaps we need a package with a hole in the array of pins to give more cooling on the bottom.
The problem of putting in more conections to the CPU is that it takes up so much space. It may be necessary to increase clock speeds for transfers on and off chip and use multiplexing. The ultimate would be serial links on laser beams. Then, we could use fewer pins and gain more access to the chip for cooling.
The move to 64 bits is overkill for most desktop users, but is wonderful for servers. I believe we could best use a small number of 64 bit water cooled beasts with hundreds of thin clients running at 10 watts or so. Now, there is a power saving. 200W for server + N X 10 W for clients is much better than N X 100 W as long as N > 3 For N=100 clients, the cost is 1200W instead of 10000W. It will take the chip techs a long time to do that, but the network boys and girls can make it happen today.
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
Most CPUs can run with a range of clockspeeds. The over-clockers go up. You can go down at less than peak loads. I work a lot with terminal servers. The load from each client is very spiked. There are burst of a second or two as a chunk of data is moved or processed. Some systems can be set to adjust clockspeed according to load just like a screensaver can blank the screen. The absolute best way to save energy is to network so that one powerful machine can serve a bunch of clients. A $1000 machine can handle 35 thin clients that need only 10 watts or so to run an LCD monitor with a low power CPU without fans built in. That's about as much power as a wall clock per client.
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
Put the powerful server in the attic or basement and network to a fanless thin client. You can also try longer video/mouse/keyboard cables if you cannot go fanless.
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
Higher temperatures increase noise levels. Room temperature is about .025 electron volt. 600C is about .075 ev I think silicon carbide or gallium arsenide are suitable semiconductors but they would need to be fabricated at higher temperatures, making precision much more difficult. On the mobo, you would have to insulate or cool all the heat sensitive components in the neighborhood
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
Finally, someone has decided it's a good idea to slow the heat-death of the universe! Come on, electronics have to be one of the biggest heat producers on earth!
... recycling the bit-bucket?
Finding better ways to suck excess energy of a chip is very well and good, but it might be better to reduce the energy produced by the chip in the first place.
If every time a 1 is set to a zero, why not feed that into a bank of capacitors rather than the current solution (which I believe is to sink it to ground, thus producing heat)?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Why are you bringing this up again for? I wrote my answer to it in a previous SlashDot article about a YEAR AGO. Chips need to be designed with a series of integrated tunnelings thru the entire chip. This would INCREASE SURFACE EXPOSURE into the chip core, magnifying the cooling effect. I guess I should write Intel and AMD instead of SlashDot... but I thought Intel & AMD was ON SLASHDOT to pick up new ideas! So, here it is. Design your chips larger, leaving cooling tunnels interspaced throughout the cpu chips. If nothing else, think of hallways in a BORG SHIP.
The heat comes from the direct conversion of electrical energy to heat inside the chip. Almost every other electrical appliance converts the electrical energy. For instance a light bulb converts it to heat and light. A drill converts it to mechanical energy. The CPU however doesn't physically do anything, the transistors just flip which requires electrical energy, which is afterwards converted into: heat! That's why every bit of energy that goes into your CPU will come out again under the form of heat, which we need to get rid of to keep the chip working.