IBM Researchers figure out a way to water cool processors from the inside
“Water-cooling” your processor isn’t a new thing in computing but water-cooling your processor from inside the processor is indeed a new thing – and that’s exactly what researchers from IBM Zurich Research Lab are working on. These researchers have figured out a way to send “tiny rivers of water” through layers of chip stacks.
Yes.. you heard me correct – layers of chip stacks. Why chip stacks? Simple really. A 3D dimensional chip stack reduces the distance between circuits and thus can significantly increase processing execution times. Thus instead of building out circuits in a flat 2D space, future CPUs will operate at multiple layers of circuits.
The problem with this design? Heat. Stacked chips quickly overheat by a factor of 10 over standard chip architectures of today. Thus, the need for an efficient CPU cooling mechanism and thus, how we get to water cooling the processor from the inside.
IBM’s water cooling design utilizes hermetically sealed double-layered tubes of silicon and silicon oxide that are around 0.002 inches in diameter. These tubes, which are inside the stacked CPU itself, carry water which absorb the heat generated by the processor. Pretty neat stuff eh?
Great – so when are we going to see a water-cooled processor in stores? Unfortunately IBM thinks it will happen within the next 5 years. Yeah.. that’s IBM research for ya!
