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by TOMDM 914 days ago
If we keep going down this route I have to wonder if we'll see something drastic in the cooling space.

CPU dies are optimised towards being cooled from one side. I wonder if we'll eventually see sockets, motherboards and heat spreaders shift towards cooling both sides of the CPU.

Probably not, can't imagine what a halfway feasible solution to integrating pin out and a heat spreader would be.
4 comments
mook 914 days ago
A couple years back they noted that they were looking at having essentially cooling pipes _inside_ the chips. There hasn't been much noise in terms of commercialization, but that's the kind of extreme they were looking at.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-exploring-on-chip-sem...

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chainingsolid 914 days ago
Heres my first thought on how you might be able to do pin out on a 'sandwich a cpu between 2 heatsinks design'.

1) DRAM gets integrated with the cpu. Slight thickness increase, probably quite a bit of added width. We get a bigger area to cool, closer ram and no need for any memory pins.

2) Add power connections to the 2 cooling sides. Running power wires through the coolers shouldn't be an issue.

3) Run as many of the fastest PCIe lanes as you can out the 4 thin sides of the package. These end up handling ALL of the IO.

Some downsides I can think of off the bat are cooking the ram chips and with so much density and heat not sure how well signal integrity would work out.

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dist-epoch 914 days ago
> cooling both sides of the CPU

That would only double cooling capacity, and has costs - completely invalidates current motherboard designs.

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teaearlgraycold 914 days ago
A relatively easy win here is to have a “stock” set of fins built into the motherboard behind the CPU socket. The CPU could get attached to it with a pad or paste on the back.
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