Faster Computer Cpu!

Faster Computers Chip!

Our modern age has become accustomed to regular improvements in information technology, says Slava Rotkin, but these advances do not come without a cost.

Take the laptop, for example. Its components, particularly its billions of semiconductor electronic circuits, are growing ever tinier while the instrument's power and capacity increase. But heat generated by electric current can cause the circuits to melt and the laptop hardware to fail.

Indeed, says Rotkin, an assistant professor of physics, a laptop in use can generate heat faster than an everyday hotplate and almost as fast as a small nuclear reactor.

Developing better methods to dissipate this heat has been listed as a "grand challenge" for modern electronics by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) , a consortium of semiconductor manufacturers.

Rotkin and colleagues at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center and at the Ioffe Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, have developed a heat-dissipation method that cools carbon nanotube electronics by utilizing nonconventional radiation in a "near-field zone" just above the substrate, or surface, on which the nanotubes rest.

The new cooling method requires that the nanotubes' substrate be composed of a polar material such as silicon-dioxide (SiO2), says Rotkin. The method channels excess heat from the nanotubes into the substrate which, being much larger, can be more effectively cooled by the vents that push cool air through laptops.

NVIDIA Corporation has introduced NVIDIA nForce(tm)3 Professional, the company's first single-chip, core-logic solution for professional computing environments. Optimised for the new 64-bit AMD Opteron(tm) processor announced recently, NVIDIA nForce3 Professional platform processors claim to provide a compatible, stable and reliable computing platform for professional workstation users who wish to exploit the benefits of both 32-bit and 64-bit computing environments. In addition, all NVIDIA platform processors take advantage of the NVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture - NVIDIA's "one driver for all platforms" design philosophy - that is said to greatly simplifies IT deployment and enhance low-cost product life cyclemanagement.NVIDIA nForce3 Professional-based motherboards are currently sampling to workstation system integrators worldwide.Source: PCBnewsline