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Behind me is a PC with an all-in-one closed loop cooler to keep the CPU from overheating.

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And unless you're trying to perform an extreme overclock, it's a pretty good solution.

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But even with the best cooler on the market, your CPU will still be quite warm.

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You know what? Why do we need water blocks at all? I mean, look at this processor.

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All of this space inside that black square is dedicated to an integrated heat spreader.

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So would it be possible to instead build water cooling right into the dye itself?

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As it turns out, the answer is yes. And to find out more, we spoke to Ellison Matteoli,

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a professor of electrical engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology

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in Lausanne, where he and his team recently developed an all-new in-chip cooling solution.

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We'd like to give him a big thank you for taking the time to talk with us.

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So a big part of their approach was to look at the electronics and the thermal management

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as a single problem, rather than the paradigm that we're more used to where

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one company works on making chips and another one works on making heat sinks or water blocks.

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Instead, the idea was to design a chip in concert with an integrated liquid cooling solution

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so that you would already know where the hotspots were.

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To demonstrate this idea, they used a device that generates a lot of heat. In this case,

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a power converter, and then etched water microchannels into a layer directly below the

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gallium nitride chip that handled the power conversion, with small capillaries below hotspots

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and larger channels operating as inflow and outflow pipes.

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The small channels adjacent to the warmer areas of the chip provide lots of surface area for heat,

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making thermal dissipation very efficient compared to traditional solutions involving a

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separate heat spreader, heat sink, and thermal paste. Remember guys, you lose a lot of efficiency

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with each step. The chip only got up to 60 degrees Celsius compared to the blistering 250 degrees

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that we would have seen without cooling. In fact, their solution ended up being able to extract

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1.7 kilowatts per square centimeter using only half a watt of pumping power. Conveniently,

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a square centimeter is roughly the same size as a modern processor die,

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and even high-end processors have TDPs in the neighborhood of just 125 to 250 watts.

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So with a solution this efficient, you could cool a chip down to near room temperature,

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especially as the process would work just as well with more familiar silicon processors.

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I mean, the amount of heat that a typical chip puts out is a whole order of magnitude less

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than what in-chip cooling could handle. But hold on a second, is this some kind of pipe dream

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that's just never going to leave the laboratory like DNA storage, unless it does eventually?

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Or could we actually see this in our desktop rigs in the near future? Well, it turns out it would

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actually be fairly trivial for a big chip maker to replicate this microchannel process in a standard

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clean room, and the research team in Switzerland has already had a number of companies approach them

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about using this technology in the coming years. Now, the most obvious benefit will be

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for server farms and data centers, where huge amounts of money are already being spent to

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keep energy costs low and, well, processor temperatures lower. However, there's no reason

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at all that we couldn't see it in our home gaming computer at some point, which could allow for

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significant increases in overclocking for enthusiasts, or maybe even better gaming on

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mobile devices or small form factor PCs, since this in-chip solution doesn't need nearly as much

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liquid defunction correctly as a traditional water cooling loop. Understandably, the lab couldn't

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tell us much about exactly which companies were inquiring about in-chip cooling, but that shouldn't

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stop you or us from dreaming about the possibilities of having a water-cooled smartwatch one day.

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Why not, right? Thanks for watching, guys! Like, dislike, check out our other videos,

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leave a comment if you have a suggestion for a future Fast as Possible, and don't forget to

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subscribe, because if you do, we're gonna keep changing our sets every time! What do you guys

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think of this? Do you like it better than the green screen? We'd love to hear your feedback!