I prefer my chips deep fried afterall.

Surely not just plain water? Well not the stuff that flows from my pipes at any rate unless you want a severe case of limescale.

<<Always makes me doubtful when a press release has a mistake that obvious. What else has the PR person misunderstood>>

Well Tony - the 1 kWatt power on a chip seems to be a bit off. The typical CPU is about 40 W - or less - with an area of about 1/4 cm2. Soooo, maybe 1kW/cm2? (Even that seems a bit high - but at least it MIGHT be within reason.)

Had to use the flame - as it is a HOT subject.

@Tony W

so your typical hotplate is 4cm2 in size?

i think your mistake is obvious...

Per cm2 most likely. A typical hotplate is more than 100cm2.

Anyway, the ex-chemist in me keeps wondering:

What kind of water are they using and how often does it needs changed?

My gut feeling is that this setup requires at least double-distilled and deionised water. Tap water is definitely out of the question here. If we ignore the lymescale bit in this setup water is actually in contact with the semiconductor itself and if it starts conducting things are bound to get really funny. The only way to make water non-conducting is to deionise and double-distill which is not cheap. On top of it the ghastly thing does not want to stay in that shape. It will scrape ions off the walls of the pipework and literally suck them out of thin air. By the time you turn around its dielectric constant shows that it is a conductor again and full of "pleasant" ions that will do their best to solidify in the most inappropriate place.

Frankly, something less capricious and temperamental than H2O is probably a much better idea for this one.

Look at the specific heat capacity, and availabiltity of the basic resource. You can buy a water cooling kit for overclocking your CPU now, so it's not exactly completely new technology.

Given the size of the pipes it'll be flowing through and the heat it'll need to shift, you're going to want as high a specific heat capacity as you can get, or you'll be pumping masses of fluid through the processor.

It doesn't mention watts/cm2 in the comparison with the hot plate

"3-D chip stacks would have an aggregated heat dissipation of close to 1 kilowatt - 10 times greater than the heat generated by a hotplate"

Which is just nonsense, hot plates don't run at 100watts.

As for not being new, it's barely even comparable to existing water cooling. At the moment you strap a heat sink on top of your chip, which you cool with water.

This design is talking about pumping water directly through a 3d stack of transistors. That's like saying the car wasn't new technology because wheel barrows already existed.

They might mean the hotplate under a coffee percolator, that's certainly not anything like as powerful as an actual 1kW electric cooker ring? To me a hotplate means a device for keeping warm something you already cooked, at low power, isn't it? Anything you cook on is a ring.

Paris because she'd have no clue in a kitchen too.

So I could build a super-computer into my hot-plate. I could then exploit the excess processor heat to cook my dinner...and 10 times quicker too?

How about running an ickle CHP plant with the hot water. Ok so it'll be larger than your average box and massively more expensive but hey in 45 years time it'll have paid for itself.

I'll get my coat.

Is the answer to all your problems unless you want to make a curry to bump of your spouse. Yes I know its an antifreeze but that antifreeze mix that you use in your car is also desigend to prevent corrosion. the question is will you buy it at $4 a bottle from the garage or $400 from IBM...

"Amazing how people get hung up on words...

By Anonymous Coward

Posted Friday 6th June 2008 11:05 GMT

Processors are hotter than hotplates,"

I would imagine that most electric cooking rings reach temperatures of well over 200 degrees centigrade / celsius, as they need to be hot enough to transfer heat to cooking oil.

I don't think many processors, or other electronic devices, can survive even 100 degrees centigrade / celsius.

Temperature != Power

/pedant

[Henry Crun:] Mngh, water cooled, eh? Er-m, mngh, Min isn't that something like the old System-360 we had at our lovely little inn down at Brighton? Where we kept the records of all those Mr & Mrs Smiths. Do you remember?

[Minnie Bannister:] Yes, Henry, there were so many of them too. We needed a serious database for the storage. Brown paper bags just didn't have the capacity, did they?

ill get my coat... the one without limescale!

Heh. You just reminded me of the old computer lab at college. As I was a temp-admin there, I had the keys for the small private office, which gave me a cozy space to sleep when we had to do overnight stuff. The "lab" was actually a "converted" warehouse, so on cold nights it got mighty cold, and we had *no* heating facilities.

So those days, I just fired up the 5-Pentium-class "cluster" and let it heat the small office. Nice energy re-use, even if the cluster itself wasn't really used after its initial demonstration phase.

Penguin 'coz the cluster ran Linux.

All we need to do is run the water through the chips and then dump it via a heat exchanger to more water... a built-in coffee (or tea) maker in every computer! Mwhahaha, my plans to over-caffeinate the world will proceed at flank speed!

"Frankly, something less capricious and temperamental than H2O is probably a much better idea for this one."

IBM sold (probably) thousands of water-cooled S/360-type Mainframes to large companies and government agencies. The large 360 machines were generally water-cooled until the 1990s. Then CMOS displaced Emitter Coupled Logic and water cooling became unnecessary for a certain time frame (until about 2005).

Long wires are always an issue in high-speed electronics, so dense packaging definitely makes sense.

We now return to liquid cooling for highest performance applications.

Cray Research used Freon for a certain time to do the cooling. Unfortunately, this nice chemical destroys the globe's ozone layer. So better fry some computer when water leaks than frying ourselves with Ultraviolet light coming through an ozone hole.

Next time something like that happens rinse it well under the tap and then leave it somewhere warm for a day or two to dry out completely.

Might even work with the stick you already washed.

I've rescued a couple of pocket calculators that got dosed with coke this way. Plus several watches that have gone through the wash. Remove the batteries first.

Paris coz she knows all about fluids gumming up the works.

"Cray Research used Freon..."

They also used liquid nitrogen for a time, which has certain advantages. Though they needed a whole basement full of cooling machinery to keep the stuff liquid in the case of the MPs. Darned superconductors.

Unfortunately, the problem here does not call for coolants that evaporate -- that would blow up the stacked chip. So we need a medium that does not itself cool anything, but transports heat. And cooling the entire system down so that Freon or its antedecessors won't evaporate will most likely lead to unwanted side effects, like some places on the board becoming superconducting, thereby frying the nearest chip.

y cant we just put the whole cpu in a freezer ?

or cant we just soak the whole thing in distilled water ?