The old geek"s joke about the microchip so warm it can iron your pants or fry an egg could soon be an understatement, according to Intel, the world"s largest chip maker.
If unchecked, the increasing power requirements of computer chips could boost heat generation to absurdly high levels, said Patrick Gelsinger, Intel chief technology officer and the chip maker"s research visionary.
By mid-decade, that Pentium PC may need the power of a nuclear reactor. By the end of the decade, you may as well be feeling a rocket nozzle than touching a chip. And soon after 2010, PC chips could feel like the bubblingly hot surface of the sun itself.
Those millions of tiny transistors that get packed into computer chips require larger and larger amounts of power to operate, and heat, an arch-enemy of electronics, is a nasty by-product. While fans and "heat sinks" can cool chips down to a degree, they are no panacea.
Gelsinger, giving the final speech of an Intel technology forum, showed the audience a slide of the impossibly high power needs of computer processors as a way of arguing that chip designers must radically change chip architectures, and that Intel would be the company to do just that.
"We need a fresh approach," Gelsinger said. "We need an architectural paradigm shift."