3D chips to take Moore's Law past 2020?

To keep up with Moore's Law processor density must double every two years. IBM and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich plan to do just that with a couple of clever improvements.

They've figured out a way to stack multiple processor cores vertically instead of next to each other as they are now. That neat trick speeds up data transfers between the cores, making them "many times faster."

With all this extra speed comes more heat, but this liquid-cooled beast's hair-thin tubes keep everything frosty, their tiny streams of refrigerant flowing among the stacked 3D cores.

The result? Aquasaur, the first water-cooled supercomputer of its kind, using multiple nano surfaces to keep its blinding speed from generating so much heat that the whole thing melts down into a useless blob of silicon and metal. Now if they could just fit this into an iPhone....

Via Kurzweil AI