Combining microchips (including GPU matrices) with diamond and other unique methods allows you to achieve significantly lower temperatures and increase performance by up to three times.

One of the biggest fundamental challenges in microchip manufacturing is temperature control, and traditional methods are showing significantly diminishing returns as we move into the 2020s and beyond. Those who follow the technical field closely can already see that this is due to the slowdown in the development of GPUs and especially CPU architectures, but manufacturers have been thinking about this problem for much longer and are working on new solutions such as synthetic diamond and synthetic diamond. refined glass!

More specifically, the WSJ recently spoke with several executives and employees at Diamond Foundry and Intel who deal with the issue in varying ways.

Diamond Foundry produces synthetic diamond wafers for use with silicon microchips, claimed to be the largest of their kind, at least in diameter. According to Martin Rocheisen, this allows the chips to run at least twice as fast as their nominal speed. Lab tests on Nvidia’s undisclosed high-end GPU reportedly deliver three times the performance of a conventional chip based on standard manufacturing materials; This is crazy, but a little hard to believe without public testing.

Intel, meanwhile, is focusing on producing refined glass for substrates (the basic package into which the processor is assembled), likely to be used in many (if not all) of its products. This is already being tested in Intel factories and will be available in the second half of the decade. Instead of cooling, cleaned glass is used to improve energy efficiency and communication between chips… but of course higher energy efficiency is also ideal for cooling.

Both of these developments look quite promising, but we may not see Diamond Foundry as the only potential supplier of diamond-based chips in the future. Even the WSJ lists other companies like Coherent or Element Six that offer their own easy-to-synthesize polycrystalline sheets. Element Six offers even larger diamonds.

As we enter a new decade, the next big shift in hardware manufacturing may be just around the corner. By using synthetic diamond and purified glass correctly, we could even create a future with semiconductors that don’t need silicon at all… at least according to Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. Only time will tell! Source