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Future Chips Will Be Hotter Than Ever
- FirmwareBurner 2y agoPentium 4, GeForce FX 5800, PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, MacBook 20??-2019: "First time?"
- TMWNN 2y agomfw you forget AMD Thunderbird Sometimes the solution is worse than the problem. My favorite example is the TRS-80 Model II and its descendants, with the combination of the fan and disk drives so loud that users experience physical discomfort. <https://archive.org/details/80-microcomputing-magazine-1983-05/page/n131/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/80-microcomputing-magazine-1983-...>
- FirmwareBurner 2y agoModern computers should come with built in piezo, haptic and rumble motors that can emulate HDD, FDD and CD-ROM sounds whenever you start a game or app. Change my mind. - Inner voice: "You don't miss the old PC noises, you just miss those times". - Shut up!
- TMWNN 2y ago<https://tryklack.com/ https://tryklack.com/> But this only simulates keyboard and mouse click sounds. In any case, you wrote "whenever you start a game or app" (my emphasis). The Model II's fan and drive noises are 100% present from start to finish, with the combination enough to drive users insane (or, at least, not want to use the $5-10,000 computer).
- bitwize 2y agoI kind of miss the bass drop the Model 16's "Thinline" drives did when they were accessed. That was a cool sound.
- bitwize 2y agoThe Model II was a loud beast. Its floppy drive drew directly from mains power, not a DC rail off the power supply, and spun all the time. The heads engaged via a solenoid that was so powerful it made a loud "thunk" sound and actually changed the size of the display on the built-in CRT. The Model 12 and 16 improved on the design, sporting Tandon "Thinline" 8" drives that ran on DC and spun down when not in use, leaving fan noise that was quite tolerable.
- the__alchemist 2y agoThis checks out. If y'all haven't specced a modern PC: Coolers for GPU and CPU are huge, watercooling is now officially recommended for new CPUs, and cases are ventilated on all sides. Disk bays are moved out of the main chamber to improve airflow. Fans everywhere. Front panels surface areas are completely covered in fans.
- tempodox 2y agoWill there be an official “cleared for frying eggs” badge? We'll have to do something with all that heat.
- arcanemachiner 2y ago> watercooling is now officially recommended for new CPUs First I'm hearing of this. Last I checked, air coolers had basically reached parity with any lower-end water cooled setup.
- the__alchemist 2y agoI was surprised too, but that's from the AMD label!
- giantg2 2y agoI built a PC last year and saw a bunch of the CPUs were recommending water cooling. There were a few high end air coolers that were compatible. I went with an AIO water cooler. It was cheap and easy. It should give as good or better temperature control as the air coolers that are 5x more expensive. My guess is manufacturers don't want to tell people they should air cool if it requires listing specific models. It's easy to just say they recommend water cooling since basically all water coolers will provide adequate performance.
- mjevans 2y agoI hope you're correct. I'm in the middle of building a replacement PC (it's been like 10 years) and went with a ~80 USD air cooler that's got two fans and a bunch of heat pipes. The case is also a consideration, I selected one that can hold a BUNCH of fans and intend to have them all always push at least a little air through, more as it gets warmer. In my case two fans on the CPU, pointing towards the rear exhaust fan to suck, and 6 fans 120mm or larger pushing air through otherwise, will _hopefully_ remain sufficient.
- rayiner 2y agoThe most power hungry P4 didn’t top 115W.
- FirmwareBurner 2y agoWhich was huge in the era when CPUs didn't underclock themselves at idle to save power and coolers looked like this: https://www.newegg.com/cooler-master-air-cooler-series-a73/p/13C-000X-00010 https://www.newegg.com/cooler-master-air-cooler-series-a73/p... Some coolers today still look like that but they're on chips drawing 35W or so while idling at <2W.
- BoredPositron 2y agoThe die was much smaller…
- formerly_proven 2y agoDie size: 135mm² A current AMD CCD is ~70mm² and can drop around 120 W or so on that area. E.g. the 9700X has one CCD and up to a 142W PPT, 20 W goes to the IOD, ~120 into the CCD. edit: (1) this account/IP-range is limited to a handful of comments per day so I cannot reply directly, having exhausted my allotment of HN comments for today (2) I do not understand what you take offense at, because I did not "change [my] original argument" - you claimed, a P4 die is much smaller, I gave a counter example, and made the example more specific in response to your comment (by adding the "E.g. ..." bit with an example of a SKU and how the power would approximately split up).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- BoredPositron 2y agoThe tdp is for the whole cpu with multiple ccds and iod…
- BoredPositron 2y ago
- gkhartman 2y agoHardest to cool cpu I've ever owned was an AMD Athlon 3200+. I remember moving to P4, and life got a lot easier. It still ran very hot, but it could do so without frequent crashing. This was before the giant coolers that we have today were common place. I was far too afraid of water cooling back then.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- trehalose 2y ago> In a frontside design, the silicon substrate can be as thick as 750 micrometers. Because silicon conducts heat well, this relatively bulky layer helps control hot spots by spreading heat from the transistors laterally. Adding backside technologies, however, requires thinning the substrate to about 1 mm to provide access to the transistors from the back. This is a typo here, right? 1mm is thicker, not thinner, than 750 micrometers. I assume 1µm was meant?
- enragedcacti 2y agoI think you're right that 1µm was meant given the orders of magnitude in other sources e.g. 200µm -> 0.3µm in this white paper: https://www.cadence.com/en_US/home/resources/white-papers/thermal-analysis-3d-stacking-beol-technologies.html https://www.cadence.com/en_US/home/resources/white-papers/th...
- jackyinger 2y agoWafers on some semiconductor processes are 0.3m in diameter. You could not practically handle a 1um thick wafer 0.3m in diameter without shattering it. 0.75mm is a reasonable overall wafer thickness.
- nottorp 2y ago<looks at the arm macs> You sure?
- pier25 2y agoThe Apple Silicon chips are indeed running hotter on every new generation, no?
- guhidalg 2y agoThat has not been my experience, do you have a source?
- celsoazevedo 2y agoJust my personal experience, but I've recently upgraded from a MBP with the M1 Max to a new MBP with the M4 Max and it does get hotter when doing heavy tasks (eg: video transcoding). It gets to 95-100ºC faster, uses more power, and the default fan curve is also more aggressive, something that Apple usually avoids doing. It's still very efficient and doesn't run hot under normal load (right now my CPU average is 38ºC with Firefox and ~15 tabs open, fans not spinning), but it definitely generates more heat than the M1 Max under load. Apple still seems to limit them to ~100ºC though.
- Almondsetat 2y agoAre you dismissing a technical article with detailed explanations and arguments about the future of CPUs by simply mentioning some piece of current consumer hardware?
- nottorp 2y agoYes, because I think they’re extatic about going the wrong way. Edit: At a quick search, if you undervolt and set power limits to reduce an intel CPU’s consumption to 50% you only lose 20-30% performance. So the industry is being extremely inefficient in the name of displaying higher numbers in benchmarks.
- Workaccount2 2y agoWhose gonna pull the trigger on beryllium oxide mounting packages first? Its the holy grail of having thermal conductivity somewhere between aluminum and copper, while being as electrically insulating as ceramic. You can put the silicon die directly on it. Problem is that the dust from it is terrifyingly toxic, but in it's finished form it's "safe to handle".
- giantg2 2y agoWon't you have conductivity issues if the oxide layer is damaged?
- pitaj 2y ago> Problem is that the dust from it is terrifyingly toxic, but in it's finished form it's "safe to handle". Doesn't that mean it would be problematic for electronics recycling?
- pelagicAustral 2y agoI don't think toxicity levels on compounds used in electronics has even been a stopper for furthering humanity
- catlikesshrimp 2y agoI know it is an hyperbole. First thing I thought was: Cadmium, Mercury, Lead and CFC. I was slightly annoyed about Cd and Hg
- ulrikrasmussen 2y agoOr getting berylliosis from putting a drill through your electronic device before throwing it out
- mppm 2y ago> Whose gonna pull the trigger on beryllium oxide mounting packages first? Nobody, presumably :) Why mess with BeO when there is AlN, with higher thermal conductivity, no supply limitations and no toxicity? Edit: I've just checked, practically available AlN substrates still seem to lag behind BeO in terms of thermal conductivity.
- onewheeltom 2y agoSeems my M1 Macbook Air generates almost no heat.
- m463 2y agogood for a laptop. what would the clocks be on a desktop part that was liquid cooled?
- LoganDark 2y agoI have an M4 Max MacBook Pro and it generates plenty of heat, especially when gaming, compiling, or transcoding. I think that's still far less heat than it could've generated if it weren't Apple Silicon, though.
- bdcravens 2y agoI have an M3 Max, and since I don't do a lot of close to the metal work, I can almost always use my fan spinning as a metric for a poorly designed app.
- LoganDark 2y agoNice :) I upgraded from an M3 Pro about a month ago. (My $2,000 mistake is not saving up for this from the start. Apple machines can't be upgraded anymore :<)
- enragedcacti 2y agoHeat and hotness don't mean the same thing in this context [1]. It doesn't help that the article seems to use heat (energy) and heat (temperature) interchangeably, but the principles of backside power delivery exacerbating hot spots and increasing peak temperatures will apply regardless of wattage or efficiency. A hypothetical (poorly designed) future M-series chip with bspdn could actually emit less heat specifically because the hotspots get hotter faster and cause throttling sooner. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat#Heat_vs._temperature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat#Heat_vs._temperature
- pfdietz 2y agoOne game that can be played is to use isotopically pure Si-28 in place of natural silicon. The thermal conductivity of Si-28 is 10% higher than natural Si at room temperature (but 8x higher at 26 K).
- HappyPanacea 2y agoHow much does it costs to manufacture? Are there any other benefits from using isotopically pure Si-28? Are there any other isotopes used in common thermal conductive material that are more conductive?
- pfdietz 2y agoThe point of improving the thermal conductivity of silicon is that silicon is what chips are made of instead of, say, diamond. Of course cost would have to be acceptable.
- HappyPanacea 2y agoI was thinking more about isotopes of copper than carbon but I can't find data about thermal conductivity of isotopically enriched copper.
- pfdietz 2y agoI don't think there would be much difference because much of the conductivity of copper is from the conduction electrons, not phonons. Isotopic purification increases thermal conductivity in silicon because it decreases phonon scattering. Isotopically pure diamond, now there's something to look at. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopically_pure_diamond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopically_pure_diamond "The 12C isotopically pure, (or in practice 15-fold enrichment of isotopic number, 12 over 13 for carbon) diamond gives a 50% higher thermal conductivity than the already high value of 900-2000 W/(m·K) for a normal diamond, which contains the natural isotopic mixture of 98.9% 12C and 1.1% 13C. This is useful for heat sinks for the semiconductor industry."
- 2y ago
- mikewarot 2y agoWe could also explore the idea that Von Neumann's architecture isn't the best choice the future. Having trillions of transistors just waiting their turn to hand off data as fast as possible doesn't seem same to me.
- esseph 2y agoWhat's your solution then?
- mikewarot 2y agoStart with an FPGA, they're optimized for performance, but too optimized, and very hard to program. Rip out all the special purpose bits that make it non-uniform, and thus hard to route. Rip out all of the long lines and switching fabric that optimizes for delays, and replace it all with only short lines to the neighboring cells. This greatly reduces switching energy. Also have the data needed for every compute step already loaded into the cells, eliminating the memory/compute bottleneck. Then add a latch on every cell, so that you can eliminate race conditions, and the need to worry about timing down to the picosecond. This results in a uniform grid of Look Up Tables (LUTS) that get clocked in 2 phases, like the colors of the chessboard. Each cell thus has stable inputs, as they all come from the other phase, which is latched. I call it BitGrid. I'd give it a 50/50 chance of working out in the real world. If it does, it'll mean cheap PetaFlops for everyone.
- UltraSane 2y agoprogramming for anything than the Von Neumann architecture is very hard.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ksec 2y agoWith AI, both GPU and CPU are pushed to the absolute limit and we shall be putting 750W to 1000W per unit with liquid cooling in Datacenter within next 5 - 8 years. I wonder if we can actually use those heat for something useful.
- datadrivenangel 2y agoAttempts to use the waste heat for anything in a data center are likely very counter productive to actually cooling the chips
- itishappy 2y agoIt's going to be too low temperature for power production, but district heating should be viable!
- formerly_proven 2y agoThe mainstream data center GPUs are already at 700 W and Blackwell sits at ~1 kW.
- esseph 2y agoWe are looking at 600kW per rack, and liquid cooling is already deployed in many places.
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoSo, one power plant per aisle of a data center?
- esseph 2y agoWell... https://www.powermag.com/the-smr-gamble-betting-on-nuclear-to-fuel-the-data-center-boom/ https://www.powermag.com/the-smr-gamble-betting-on-nuclear-t...
- mjevans 2y agoThe article mentions backside (underside) power distribution, capacitors to help regulate voltage (thus allowing tighter tolerances and lower voltage / operating power), voltage regulation under the chip, and finally dual-layer stacking with the above as potential avenues to spread heat dissipation. I can't help but wonder, where exactly is that heat supposed to go on the underside of the chip? Modern CPUs practical float atop a bed of nails.
- berbec 2y agoa second heatsink mounted the back of the chip? maybe the socket the chip in suck a way the back touches a copper plate attached to some heatpipes? plenty of options
- BizarroLand 2y agoI mean, there's no real reason a chip has to be a wafer. A toroidal shape would allow more interconnects to be interspaced throughout the design as well as more heat-transfer points alongside the data transfer interconnects. Something like chiplet design where each logical section is a complete core or even an SOC with a robust interconnect to the next and previous section. If that were feasible, you could build it onto a hollow tube structure so that heat could be piped out from all sides once you sandwich the chip in a wraparound cooler. I guess the idea is more scifi than anything, though. I doubt anyone other than ARM or RISC-V would ever even consider the idea until some other competitor proves the value.
- amelius 2y agoSpeaking of dissipation, how is the progress in reversible computing going?
- onewheeltom 2y agoIsn’t heat just wasted energy?
- Havoc 2y agoIs there a reason we can’t put heat pipes directly into chips? Or underneath
- InDubioProRubio 2y agoI guess future designs will have a cooling ring integrated into the chiplets.. the dark silicon starts up, finds in the memory shared with the previous hot silcone the instructions and cache, computes till heat death, stores all it did in the successor chiplet - it all is on a ring like structure, that is always boiling in some cooling liquid its directly immersed in, going forever round and round. It reminds me of the Ian M. Banks setup of the fireplanet Echronedal in the player of games.