3DFabric

One trend in the high performance computing (HPC) space that is becoming increasingly clear is that power consumption per chip and per rack unit is not going to stop with the limits of air cooling. As supercomputers and other high performance systems have already hit – and in some cases exceeded these limits – power requirements and power densities have continued to scale up. And based on the news from TSMC's recent annual technology symposium, we should expect to see this trend continue as TSMC lays the groundwork for even denser chip configurations. The problem at hand is not a new one: transistor power consumption isn't scaling down nearly as quickly as transistor sizes. And as chipmakers are not about to leave performance on the...