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Comment by bbor | Hacker News Reader

We’re all just wasting time until someone figures out how to make wafers into shells that nest together into spheres, right? People talk about the end of Moore’s law and such, but we’ve still got a whole other dimension to work with…

Gosh, if they let me handle this chip design stuff, I’d have it figured out in no time! Looks easy.

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That other dimension is the one we use to dissipate heat.

We should go 4D and start dissipating heat into the past.

Wait... global warming... shakes fist at the future

Ah, that's how the ice age ended

Well, the Earth was in a different point in space in the past, so it would not end up on Earth.

Interesting idea, although if true then time travelling even a second earlier/later would likely put you several hundred km in the sky (or the ground). I guess any potential time travelling device would have a reference point located in itself, therefore prohibiting this effect.

Sometimes I daydream about what would happen if FTL communications were possible, but only over short millimeters. It’d seem useless right?

Until someone figured out how to put it in chips! Faster processing and memory.

Also there would be a poetry to FTL via quantum entanglement being possible only as a speculative “guess”, similar to specter but on the quantum hardware of the universe. Sure FTL signals might be impossible but guessing at FTL signals might not be. ;)

> Sometimes I daydream about what would happen if FTL communications were possible, but only over short millimeters. It’d seem useless right?

this is already a thing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light#:~:text=In%2...).

Alas, virtual particles appear to travel FTL, communication isn't possible with them:

> Therefore, this does not imply the possibility of superluminal information transmission.

The idea of a time travel loop in the processor reminds me of a talk by Damian Conway, in which he shows how avant-garde Perl code to exploit sci-fi hardware.

"Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Spacetimes... Made Easy!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpInOI4o2LY

Sort of the opposite to what we do with CO2 production at the moment?

And to supply power - some of the crazy powerful AI chips like Tesla's Dojo and Cerebras chip need significant copper under the chip to get enough power in. I think the Cerebras WSI chip is like 5 kW, at low voltage that's a ton of wires.

Stupid question: could you literally just put a grid of coolant tubes through a cube processor? Think like the shape of control rods for a nuclear reactor. Power supply is also tricky with a cube chip, but could you electrify the coolant flowing through the tubes? Half of the tubes positive, half negative. So the tubes through the cube double up thermal and electrical conductance.

EDIT: stupid idea #2: what if you also used peltier cooling to route heat out of hot spots?

You could. Tighter cooling integration for denser ICs is an area of active research but is something that needs to be economical at scale to matter. If a rack full of flat chips does more work per dollar than a complicated-to-manufacture 3d-stacked coolant-permeable IC, there's not a very strong argument for building them.

Peltiers are inefficient as all hell and not likely to be part of such a tightly integrated solution.

You know why elephants move so slowly?

Because the cells in the middle would cook themselves if they had the same metabolism as human cells.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law

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