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3M To play a large part in the future of CPUs?

Gundog48

Gundog48

Gundog48

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Yes, you heard it right- 3M! IBM has been working with 3M to develop a new heat-dissipating adhesive that could be used to 'glue' silicon chips together to create a silicon 'brick'. They have said that it is possible to stack 1000 chips with the equivalent power of a normal CPU which they have crudely calculated as being 1000 times faster. Interesting stuff, but will it actually work? Will it be able to deal with heat well enough? That is yet to be seen.

Source
 
Seen this on SA, looks interesting. Possible uses are integrating nearly all IO onto the die, full system on chip near enough
 
I saw this one before, doesn't this mean that every "stacked" chip will be a different part of the silicone wafer it is manufactured from though?

If so wont this make for some seriously expensive chips? Just one chip off of a wafer is expensive enough.
 
Lots of different (or identical) layers, could be identical or different. Pin outs would be hard work for a large number of different "devices" on one chip I guess
 
no matter what they glue the silicon together with if you have 1000 layers each with a tdp of 95w that's still going to be 95,000w, i can't see how that's going to work.
 
I'm guessing that if so much as one of the layers fails that would render anything above it dead, potentially anyway. In reality they probably wont be stacking more than 4 layers, two could be pretty cool actually if you think about it, CPU cores on the bottom, GPU cores on the top, would make for a rather powerful 8 core + APU.

This could just be one of those things like the plastic CPUs they made a fair few years back, I don't think they ever got those operating above a few mhz. If they don't innovate technology doesn't move on.

BTW a "Tower" of CPU blocks could be cooled fairly "easily" by direct contact none conductive fluids. While that is probably out of the question for home users I can see why that may be beneficial to the server and super computer market.
 
Cant wait to hear how it gets on.

As Morningstar says, cooling doesn't look to be an insurmountable problem. Im sure as part of the design some form of heat transfer layer/section could be incorporated into the silicon in addition to the thermal adhesive between layers to aid heat transfer in the centre of the block.

Also these do not need to simply be 100's of traditional x86 95w cpu dies stacked one on top of each other. They will undoubtably be significanly modified and include other necessary circuitry too. You have more area to work with and placement options available. Theres no telling what the thermal charecteristics may be exactly.
Im just glad it will be somebody elses headache.
 
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