IBM, this week, demonstrated how it uses water to cool three-dimensional stacks of processors. While still years away from production, this technology could well be implemented for its multicore servers as early as 2013. This method is heralded as being able to reduce power consumption as well as dramatically improve performance, but brings along with it intractable heating and cooling issues. By creating 50-micron channels between stacked chips, IBM is able to cool down the stack at a rate of 180 watts per layer.
The company obviously believes that water cooling is the ideal solution to stacking processors together. In fact, IBM's paper on this topic, "Forced convective interlayer cooling in vertically integrated packages," received a Best Paper award at an IEEE conference.
For more on water-cooled processors:
- check out this The Register article [1]
Links:
[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/05/ibm_chips_liquid/