Microchips May Soon Need Enormous Power - Intel CTO

Reuters | February 19, 2004

[HAL9000]

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The old geek's joke about the microchip so warm it can iron your pants or fry an egg could soon be an understatement, according to Intel, the world's largest chip maker.

If unchecked, the increasing power requirements of computer chips could boost heat generation to absurdly high levels, said Patrick Gelsinger, Intel Corp. chief technology officer and the chip maker's research visionary.

By mid-decade, that Pentium PC may need the power of a nuclear reactor. By the end of the decade, you might as well be feeling a rocket nozzle than touching a chip. And soon after 2010, PC chips could feel like the bubblingly hot surface of the sun itself.

Those millions of tiny transistors that get packed into computer chips require larger and larger amounts of power to operate, and heat, an arch-enemy of electronics, is a nasty byproduct. While fans and "heat sinks" can cool chips down to a degree, they are no panacea.

Gelsinger, giving the final speech of an Intel technology forum, showed the audience a slide of the impossibly high power needs of computer processors as a way of arguing that chip designers must radically change chip architectures, and that Intel would be the company to do just that.

"We need a fresh approach," Gelsinger said. "We need an architectural paradigm shift."

[HAL9000]

The x86 architecture is 25 years old, hopelessly brain-damaged, and it runs too hot.

[Jeff Chandler]

My son-in-law's chips are water cooled.

[LibertyAndJusticeForAll]

I wonder where the next generation chip will be designed? I doubt it will be designed in America by Americans.

[staytrue]

We would not need any more chip horsepower if it were not for MS Windows. Windows is a pos software that only runs with 1 gig memory and a 2 gig processor.

Start over with clean well written code and our computers will run 20 times faster with the same hardware.

[sixmil]

The last chip I bought said not to power it before the heat sink is firmly attached or it would be insta-fried. Also, I think someone told me once that you could arc weld with the current that goes through PC chips now. Anyway, I won't be surprised if we soon have PCs with refrigerators built in, which is lame since they are already getting too loud with all the fans they have now.

[spodefly]

I have not gone for water-cooling yet, but my 2 rack mount servers at the spodefly world headquarters have enough fans in them to sound like a small jet plane at takeoff. Chicks dig it.

[Jeff Chandler]

my 2 rack mount servers at the spodefly world headquarters have enough fans in them to sound like a small jet plane at takeoff. Chicks dig it.

Can you imagine what they'll think when they see the water cooling system's translucent reservoir glowing from blue LEDs!

[Yossarian]

"We need a fresh approach," Gelsinger said. "We need an architectural paradigm shift."

Hey Gelsinger, you just need new circuit topologies...I'll be there soon, AMD will be there...and when Intel runs scared, they'll be there with a vengance too.....

[CurlyDave]

Can you imagine what they'll think when they see the water cooling system's translucent reservoir glowing from blue LEDs!

I may also glow from the mutant algae that grow in it...

[The Radical Capitalist]

I've got an AMD chip that's already two years old, but it puts out more heat than box of Ohio Blue Tips left on the front burner. My case has got 3 fans going full blast all the time, along with a fan for the processor and a fan for the video board. A few weeks ago, a Korean voice on the motherboard warned me that the processor temp was getting too high. Took the cover off an noticed dust on the copper heat sink. Brushed and vaccumed it away, and now it runs as cold as yesterday's mashed potatoes.

[Jeff Chandler]

Actually, the surreal glow from the antifreeze does look just like mutant algae!

[Jeff Chandler]

As for dust, if you use canned air, stick a pencil or something in the fan blades you're dusting, or you can burn out the little tiny bearings.

[lelio]

Start over with clean well written code and our computers will run 20 times faster with the same hardware.

You don't by chance happen to work for Sun do you? ;) That's their main push: thin clients with small processors and let the back office do the heavy lifting.

I'm seriously looking into recommending some Sun Rays for the company I work for to replace our aging PCs, since all the users do is use a word processor, web browser, and email. Why buy a 3GHz processor just to do that? And if you don't get the fastest processor and a user goes to someone's desk that does have one you immediately get a complaint about how slow their own PC is.

Plus with that configuration I wouldn't have to worry about the latest Outlook (Lookout!) virus or some ASN.1 patch for Windows. And if things get slow I'll just add some more server power to be shared by all.

[ImaGraftedBranch]

I believe the author is mistaken.

It is not that the chips neccessarily require a lot more power, it is that they have been able to fit many more transistors into the same real estate, which allows the chip to run faster, creating more friction, and as a result, heat.

The smaller distances that the electrons have to travel have in fact kept the voltage requirements DOWN.

Nuclear reactor?

Sheesh.