Someone has used diamonds and a high-end Nvidia GPU to build perhaps the world’s fastest graphics card ever — but you won’t be able to buy it yet
Diamond Foundry used heteroepitaxy to create single-crystal diamonds on scalable substrates
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Diamond Foundry has been trying to figure out how it can use diamonds to keep the temperature of thebest CPUsand thebest GPUsunder control – and it’s generated some gobsmacking results.
Testing on an undisclosed high-endNvidiaGPU – which uses synthetic diamond wafers – has led to roughly three times the recorded performance versus when it was tested with standard manufacturing materials, according to theWall Street Journal (WSJ).
These benchmarks haven’t been published, so these claims cannot be taken at face value, let alone put a date against which we’d expect diamond-cooled graphics cards to be commercially available. But, if these benchmarks are true, it would make the graphics card the fastest in the world.
Diamonds can be forever
Keeping microchips cool is something that’s becoming more and more pertinent the smaller these components become. In order to pack more power into smaller packages, the industry must find a sustainable and suitable way to keep the components cool to ensure they can hit maximum performance levels for as long as possible.
This is the world’s first 100mm single-crystal diamond wafer and is the culmination of a project that began 30 years ago, according to the company. The organization used a technology called heteroepitaxy to create single-crystal diamonds on scalable substrates – and has found a means to scale this too.
While Diamond Foundry has been exploring whether diamond wafers can be incorporated into chip design,Intel has been focusing on using glass substratesin its product line.
Rather than helping to keep the components cool directly,Intel’s glass solution is being used to improve efficiency and communication between different chips.
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Diamond Foundry is hoping to reduce the defect density in its diamond waver and to 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.
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Keumars Afifi-Sabet is the Technology Editor for Live Science. He has written for a variety of publications including ITPro, The Week Digital and ComputerActive. He has worked as a technology journalist for more than five years, having previously held the role of features editor with ITPro. In his previous role, he oversaw the commissioning and publishing of long form in areas including AI, cyber security, cloud computing and digital transformation.
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