IBM researched 5D electronic blood to speed up processor chips

This type of liquid called "5D electronic blood" is IBM's solution to solve the problem of supplying energy and heat dissipation for future processors.

Electronic blood technology improves the speed of processor chips

IBM is currently developing a new way to solve the problems that improve the power that modern processors are having.The "Green Giant" is currently seeking to re-simulate the activity patterns of living blood using fluids to simultaneously provide energy and heat dissipation capabilities to microprocessors. This fluid is called by IBM "5D electronic blood".

The problem of clock and heat dissipation

Over the past four decades, the leading index of increased performance for processing chips is clock speed. Architectural improvements have made today's microprocessors 50 times more powerful than the 8086 chips of the 1970s. The number of multipliers has increased performance by 2-8 times, depending on the type. CPU and workload. But in general, the architecture and multiplication factors are not as important as the clock - today's microprocessors are clocked at around 4.5 GHz, 1000 times higher than the 4.77 MHz chip. 8086 years ago.

In fact, the architectural and multiplier factors all require software optimization as well as multithreading capabilities of applications. In contrast, clocking is another factor that can bring about significant performance gains without the need for software intervention, provided the CPU cores are provided with sufficient power and heat dissipation.

Techniques that increase the number of transistors and pulses have played the most important role in increasing CPU power over the past few decades.

While the input and output of the CPU continues to be the bottleneck of the system (similar to some memory technologies), the fact that CPU clock has played a key role in the process of increasing performance for computers until about 2004.

Since then, everything has not progressed in the old way. One of the main reasons for this situation is the CPU's heat dissipation method. The latest Xeon Haswell chips from Intel use heat dissipation mechanism in two basic clock bands (base) and overclocking (turbo). In basic mode, the processor chip only has a lower clock rate. Because running all four processor cores together with some power-hungry scripts like AVX2 will make pushing the pulse even more difficult.

So the layout of heat dissipation on CPUs today becomes a difficult problem. For each new CPU, this problem becomes more serious. Previously, engineers could improve the problem of increased heat when "stuffing" transistors close together by reducing the leakage current and voltage. Today, reducing the voltage is no longer feasible, so "stuffing" the transistors will reduce the heat dissipation.

There are scripts that make CPU clock difficult to reach the desired level.

"5D electronic blood"

How does IBM solve this problem?"Green Giants" will simulate how animals work by using "blood vessels" to both power and heat the chip. Liquid heat dissipation is no longer a strange concept for the overclocking community. The effectiveness of this form is also nothing to discuss. In contrast, the use of liquid to supply CPU power is unprecedented. While this path is still new, the use of liquid to provide CPU power helps solve two critical problems: providing power to the CPU cores and dissipating heat more efficiently when stacked chip board on each other.

One of the reasons why Intel and AMD have not produced chips with stacked CPU cores is because there is currently no way to make chips this way without serious heat dissipation problems. The heat generated from the CPU core at the bottom will propagate to the top CPU core, causing the amount of heat generated by the entire structure to be quite large. This is also the reason for high-end GPU lines to switch to 2.5D arrangement models instead of using VRAM design on GPU chips. And also the reason why NAND 3D memory chip technology is leading the way of vertical memory chip design.

The liquid called "5D electronic blood" is IBM's solution to bring both power and heat dissipation to microprocessors.

The middle components are more difficult to dissipate than other parts.

The ability to supply power to a stacked chip design is also limited, because manufacturers now have no way to supply power to the centralized personnel without having to deal with heat dissipation problems. for electrical circuits. However, if it is possible to integrate power supply capabilities in combination with liquid radiators, most (or even all) of these problems will be solved. Creating such a system will require a battery that provides power that can be recharged an unlimited number of times.

So why, this is the time when we need to step up our understanding of "electronic blood" technology ? The reason is that the expansion of the traditional 2D chip will cause the power consumption as well as the size of the chip to increase exponentially as manufacturers increase the number of components (core, cache, process). memory controller .) of the chip.

In the chart below, you can see at the same power consumption level, the 3D model allows "stuffing" the number of components more than thousands of times the 2D model, and the "biological" model (bionic ) there is more.

The increase rate of the number of components on the processor with electricity (left) and volume (right).2D scenario is the old horizontal chip manufacturing technology, 3D shows new technology, and Bionic packaging is the level of "cramming" the cells of organisms.

Unfortunately, except for the IBM 5D electronic blood technology and the boron arsenide material invented by the US Navy two years ago, the technology for current microprocessor cooling has not been significantly improved. Therefore, almost all future computing hopes will probably be placed in the "Green Giant" hands . If "5D electronic blood" succeeds, Moore's law will probably last many years.