4 As to what those applications might be, Dr Mischenko is still a little hazy. He has, nevertheless, set up a company to pursue them. He foresees putting his discovery to use in more efficient domestic fridges and air conditioners. The real money, though, may be in cooling computers.
5 Gadgets containing microprocessors have been getting hotter for a long time. One consequence of Moores Law, which describes the doubling of the number of transistors on a chip every 18 months, is that the amount of heat produced doubles as well. In fact, it more than doubles, because besides increasing in number, the components are getting faster. Heat is released every time a logical operation is performed inside a microprocessor, so the faster the processor is, the more heat it generates. Doubling the frequency quadruples the heat output. And the frequency has doubled a lot. The first Pentium chips sold by Dr Moores company, Intel, in 1993, ran at 60m cycles a second. The Pentium 4--the last single-core desktop processor--clocked up 3.2 billion cycles a second.
6 Disposing of this heat is a big obstruction to further miniaturisation and higher speeds. The innards of a desktop computer commonly hit 80℃. At 85℃, they stop working. Tweaking the processors heat sinks has reached its limit. So has tweaking the fans that circulate air over those heat sinks. And the idea of shifting from single-core processors to systems that divided processing power between first two, and then four, subunits, in order to spread the thermal load, also seems to have the end of the road in sight.
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