Name: Why Diamonds Could Be the Key to Making Microchips Faster
Uploaded: 2023-11-09T18:33:00Z
Duration: 6 min 12 s
Description: Engineers are experimenting with some surprising materials to cool down microchips. WSJ tech columnist Christopher Mims joins host Julie Chang to explain why diamonds could be the key to beating the heat in chips and thereby making them faster. Plus, Cordilia James from the personal tech team tells us about folks who never update the software on their devices. Photo: Diamond Foundry

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Engineers are experimenting with some surprising materials to cool down microchips. WSJ tech columnist Christopher Mims joins host Julie Chang to explain why diamonds could be the key to beating the heat in chips and thereby making them faster. Plus, Cordilia James from the personal tech team tells us about folks who never update the software on their devices. Photo: Diamond Foundry

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Why Diamonds Could Be the Key to Making Microchips Faster

Julie: Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Thursday, November 9th. I'm Julie Chang for the Wall Street Journal. Microchips get hot. Engineers cram more functions and power into chips. The chips in return require more energy and that produces more and more heat. Now, to beat that heat, engineers are looking to synthetic diamonds as a possible solution, and by cooling the chips, they could make them run even faster. To tell us more about that, we're joined by WSJ tech columnist Christopher Mims. Christopher, can you start by explaining why microchips get so hot in the first place?

Christopher: Microchips have always gotten hot. That is just the central limit of how fast they can get. If you're old enough to remember when laptops got so hot that they were uncomfortable on your lap, then you understand the core problem. And then if you just extrapolate and think about all these giant AI models that everybody's pushing these days and how much processing they require, well, just imagine a giant warehouse full of microchips running as fast as they possibly can to train these new AI models, and they're gonna pump as much electricity through them as they can, and that means they're going to get hot all the way up to their limits.

Julie: So when it comes to microchips, the reason they're hot is because there's just so much electricity running through them at rapid speeds?

Christopher: Yeah, it's really a one-to-one correlation. If you can pump more electricity through a microchip, that's what it uses to do its calculations. All other things being equal, it's just gonna do more math.

Julie: How is that heat problem being solved right now? Because there are microchips in everything.

Christopher: One way that that problem is solved right now is that engineers have gotten more and more clever about how they build the systems we rely on to make sure that the chips never get too hot. So like in your phone, the limitation isn't just heat, but the amount of battery life you have, of course. So those chips are engineered to run as efficiently as possible in the cloud, in a data center, in a gaming pc, let's say, it's a different story, and forever companies have put these giant heat sinks. They look really funny. Some of them are like six inches tall in some of these really big systems and it's just a bunch of metal fins and it's like the radiator on an old car. It's just there to keep that thing from overheating.

Julie: Silicon is a big part of the chips that we have today. Is that element playing a role in why chips get so hot?

Christopher: Yeah, silicon, it is great as a semiconductor, which means it's great as being a thing for calculating stuff for making microchips out of. But compared to most materials, it's kind of an insulator for heat. Not that you could make a jacket out of it, but if you did, it would keep you relatively warm if you walked outside on a cold day. So that's really bad if you want to get rid of heat because the silicon is gonna tend to hold that heat in and it's hard to carry that heat away and that limits how fast these chips can operate.

Julie: Okay, so scientists are now looking at different materials to use so that they can beat the heat. What is one material they're looking at and why?

Well, by far the coolest is diamond. And diamond is hard to make. We only learned how to make it in a lab starting in the 1950s. At first we couldn't make very big crystals of it, but lately engineers have figured out how to make these giant thin wafers of diamond and they make it in different ways, but it's a big, perfectly transparent wafer. Just picture like a four or five inch across glass disc. That's what it looks like, but it's actually diamond, and diamond can carry heat better than any other substance known to humanity. So diamond is so good at carrying heat away that if you had a little chip of one of these diamond discs in your hand, you could use it to just cut through a chunk of ice, like a hot knife through butter, because the diamond is actually conducting the heat from your body into the ice.

Julie: And how important is it for them to get this right?

Christopher: So, heat is the number one limiter of how fast a microchip can run in a data center where you have as much power as you need. And especially for training these new AI models, getting the chips you need is hard. They're very expensive. There's a long waiting list to get your hands on them. So if you can take a given AI supercomputer and run it twice as fast, it's like you just doubled the number of AI supercomputers you have. So if you can make these AI supercomputers run a lot faster by pairing them with diamond or some other substance, it can save you tens or hundreds of millions of dollars if you're a big company like Google or OpenAI.

Julie: Are there any barriers to using new materials in microchips?

Christopher: Up to now, the real barrier to using things like diamond to help cool microchips is cost, availability, and just the state of the art wasn't quite there yet, but apparently what we're gonna see in the next 12 to 24 months is big chip makers rolling out more and more chips that are like a sandwich, and on top of it is diamond. So the the art of making synthetic diamonds has come a long way. And there have been some recent refinements and breakthroughs and that has helped drive down the cost. And so it seems like data centers might be the next place that you see a lot of diamonds.

Julie: All right, that was our tech columnist, Christopher Mims. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Anthony Banse with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm Julie Chang for the Wall Street Journal. We'll be back tomorrow. Thank you for listening.

WSJ's Your Money Briefing podcast is your personal-finance and career checklist. Finance reporters and experts break down complicated money questions every weekday to help you make better decisions about managing your money. 