Diamond Foundry has been trying to figure out how to use diamonds to control the temperatures of the best CPUs and the best GPUs – and it’s had some amazing results.
Testing on an undisclosed high-end Nvidia GPU – which uses synthetic diamond wafers – resulted in roughly three times the recorded performance compared to when it was tested with standard production materials, according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
These benchmarks have not been published, so these claims cannot be taken at face value, let alone setting a date by which we would expect diamond-cooled graphics cards to be commercially available. But if these benchmarks hold true, it would make the graphics card the fastest in the world.
Diamonds can be forever
Keeping microchips cool is becoming increasingly relevant as these components become smaller. To pack more power into smaller packages, the industry must find a sustainable and suitable way to keep components cool so they can reach their maximum performance levels for as long as possible.
This is the world’s first 100mm monocrystalline diamond wafer and, according to the company, is the culmination of a project that began thirty years ago. The organization used a technology called heteroepitaxy to create monocrystalline diamonds on scalable substrates – and has found a way to scale it too.
While Diamond Foundry is exploring whether diamond wafers can be integrated into chip design, Intel has focused on using glass substrates in its product line.
Instead of directly keeping components cool, Intel’s glass solution is used to improve efficiency and communication between different chips.
Diamond Foundry hopes to reduce the density of defects in its diamond wave and realize the full potential of diamond as a cooling mechanism, which, the company claims, is 17,200 times better than silicon and 60 times better than silicon carbide.