Why heat is the main problem in chips today
From 20 Years of R&D. Matched in 3 Months by 2 Friends. on Deeptech Decoded, with Advaith Sridhar.
Transcript
And you need to be in full PPE gear and so on, all because a skin cell might fall from your hand. And that would completely contaminate all of the samples that they work with. So there's many hard problems in the field. And many of these problems people don't have solutions for.
Mm.
it doesn't matter that it's great that there are so many people in the field. But the mountain to climb is much larger than what people estimate.
Yeah.
the common thing that I I kinda see between you and the ones who have the strong experience and also tackling the same space like periodic labs, you guys are kinda really saying, if we figure out semiconductors, we are gonna figure out so many others too. So let's let's focus on this one. At the same time, maybe it can help us understand better why do we tackle semiconductors, right?
There is also all the reasoning behind this, not in terms of everything could be more efficient, more high power, but there is a blocker there that you want to actually tackle. Maybe then we can now go one step further on what exactly you want to tackle.
Yeah, yeah. Particularly in chips, the main problem that everyone faces today is the problem of heat. So if you look at the latest generation of NVIDIA GPUs, the Blackwells run at around 1,000 watts of, they call it TDP or thermal design power So they're giving out, it's crazy. It's like a one inch cross one inch chip. And this gives out the same amount of heat as a house in the US does. And it consumes the same amount of power as a house in the US.
The Rubin's coming out, I think at the end of this year, they gave out 2000 Watts. So it's doubling. And so it's two houses of power given out by the small chip. The Rubin Ultra
Mm.
is coming out next year. I've to be 4,000 Watts. So it's quadripling. the amount of, yeah, yeah. if you look at
Is it quadrupling really? I didn't I didn't know that. gosh.
any of these graphs of the power consumed by GPUs, it's going up like an exponential. Yeah.
Kinda like this.
And that's causing huge heat problems for them. None of the materials were ever designed keeping in mind that, we're going to run this at 4,000 watts. And so they all start
Mm.
