A New System for #Cooling Down #Computers Could #Revolutionize the Pace of #Innovation
Issued by Smithsonian Magazine
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
SEPTEMBER 16, 2020 8:00AM
A Swiss team has created tiny, fluid-filled channels in microchips to spirit away heat and save energy
n 1965, Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, forecast that computing would increase in power and decrease in price exponentially. For decades what later became known as Moore’s Law proved true, as microchip processing power roughly doubled and costs dropped every couple of years. But as power increased exponentially, so did the heat produced by packing billions of transistors atop a chip the size of a fingernail.
As electricity meets resistance passing through those processors it creates heat. More processors mean higher temperatures, threatening the continued growth of computer power because as they get hotter, chips decrease in efficiency and eventually fail. There’s also an environmental cost. Those chips, and the cooling they require, devour power with an insatiable hunger. Data centers use roughly one percent of the world's electricity. In the United States alone, they consume electricity and water for cooling roughly equivalent to that used by the entire city of Philadelphia in a year.
Commenti
Posta un commento