• Georgia Tech researchers take liquid cooling directly onto the chip, might enable CPU 'stacking'
    32 replies, posted
I don't think multi-cpu will be that special, all this means is we might be able to fit more cores or higher performance gear in a smaller place and run water-cooling between the silicon layers of a CPU. We have had duel-CPU motherboards for ages, the only issue is space, and before you think this will save a lot of space, if we put 2 CPUs on top of each-other, we would need: Thicker PCB to handle twice the current. Twice the number of buck converters and inductors to power the extra CPU, twice any other essentials + management chip-sets and so on. The main benefit I see here is compactness, if we used this technology on a much larger scale, we could make PCBs much more compact, cool the PCBs, power components and processing components through small water channels and you could start stacking PCBs very tightly, making small computer 'blocks' with simple input/output connections and some screwed in water blocks. -BRB, Patenting-
A number of the workstation vendors did that in the 90's. Sun's SparcStation 20 for example had modular CPU's where a pluggable board had one or two cpu's, external cache and all voltage regulation necessary to make it all work. The motherboard only had to supply the data bus and a single voltage rail to which the regulators could produce all the necessary voltages. It wouldn't work in the PC market because nobody would use the same bus for more than a few years and manufacturing PIMM's like that typically costs a lot more per unit.
[QUOTE=wraithcat;48879805]It's a bit better now with SLI/crossfire and how ubiquitous it's becoming. This would allow you to essentially reduce the footprint of the card, since you can build in 3d much easier as opposed to plonking chips on a 2d plane as you have to now. Alternatively you can make make a sli on one card solution as well (you just need to put it into two slots, since we don't have the bandwidth otherwise)[/QUOTE] You don't need 2 slots. No single GPU out there is really oversaturating a full x16 slot.
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