4 ms·

Maybe I’m missing something here, but wouldn’t heat become a bigger issue? Right now we have pretty intense cooling solutions to get heat off the surface of a c

Maybe I’m missing something here, but wouldn’t heat become a bigger issue? Right now we have pretty intense cooling solutions to get heat off the surface of a comparatively thinner chip. If chips become more cubic how would we cool the inside?

TOMDM 3y ago
If we keep going down this route I have to wonder if we'll see something drastic in the cooling space. CPU dies are optimised towards being cooled from one side. I wonder if we'll eventually see sockets, motherboards and heat spreaders shift towards cooling both sides of the CPU. Probably not, can't imagine what a halfway feasible solution to integrating pin out and a heat spreader would be.
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  A relatively easy win here is to have a “stock” set of fins built into the motherboard behind the CPU socket. The CPU could get attached to it with a pad or paste on the back.
- mook 3y ago
  A couple years back they noted that they were looking at having essentially cooling pipes _inside_ the chips. There hasn't been much noise in terms of commercialization, but that's the kind of extreme they were looking at. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-exploring-on-chip-semiconductor-integrated-watercooling https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-exploring-on-chip-sem...
- dist-epoch 3y ago
  > cooling both sides of the CPU That would only double cooling capacity, and has costs - completely invalidates current motherboard designs.
- chainingsolid 3y ago
  Heres my first thought on how you might be able to do pin out on a 'sandwich a cpu between 2 heatsinks design'. 1) DRAM gets integrated with the cpu. Slight thickness increase, probably quite a bit of added width. We get a bigger area to cool, closer ram and no need for any memory pins. 2) Add power connections to the 2 cooling sides. Running power wires through the coolers shouldn't be an issue. 3) Run as many of the fastest PCIe lanes as you can out the 4 thin sides of the package. These end up handling ALL of the IO. Some downsides I can think of off the bat are cooking the ram chips and with so much density and heat not sure how well signal integrity would work out.

TOMDM 3y ago

If we keep going down this route I have to wonder if we'll see something drastic in the cooling space. CPU dies are optimised towards being cooled from one side. I wonder if we'll eventually see sockets, motherboards and heat spreaders shift towards cooling both sides of the CPU. Probably not, can't imagine what a halfway feasible solution to integrating pin out and a heat spreader would be.

teaearlgraycold 3y ago
A relatively easy win here is to have a “stock” set of fins built into the motherboard behind the CPU socket. The CPU could get attached to it with a pad or paste on the back.
mook 3y ago
A couple years back they noted that they were looking at having essentially cooling pipes _inside_ the chips. There hasn't been much noise in terms of commercialization, but that's the kind of extreme they were looking at. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-exploring-on-chip-semiconductor-integrated-watercooling https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-exploring-on-chip-sem...
dist-epoch 3y ago
> cooling both sides of the CPU That would only double cooling capacity, and has costs - completely invalidates current motherboard designs.
chainingsolid 3y ago
Heres my first thought on how you might be able to do pin out on a 'sandwich a cpu between 2 heatsinks design'. 1) DRAM gets integrated with the cpu. Slight thickness increase, probably quite a bit of added width. We get a bigger area to cool, closer ram and no need for any memory pins. 2) Add power connections to the 2 cooling sides. Running power wires through the coolers shouldn't be an issue. 3) Run as many of the fastest PCIe lanes as you can out the 4 thin sides of the package. These end up handling ALL of the IO. Some downsides I can think of off the bat are cooking the ram chips and with so much density and heat not sure how well signal integrity would work out.