Boffins in Switzerland have warned that increasingly powerful computer processors are set to guzzle the entire world electricity supply by the year 2100. They say that only 3D myria-core chips can save the day. “Industry’s data centres already consume as much as 2% of available electricity,” says John R Thome of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).
According to Thome, the answer is to expand on today’s multicore processors by building three-dimensional arrays of cores - rather than just laying them out on a sheet. Boffins at the EPFL have allied with others at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zürich (ETH Zurich) and from IBM’s Swiss lab at Rüschlikon to conduct the CMOSAIC project, which is aimed at delivering processors with as many transistors per cm3 as there are neurons in the human brain. IBM has just come on board the Swiss government-funded effort.
