A lot of people avoid liquid cooling systems for PCs because they are afraid of leaks, consider them too expensive, or simply don't need such a thing as "liquid cooling," but this is slowly moving from the enthusiast area to mainstream. Do you want a proof? What if I say that IBM uses water cooling in its labs on a regular basis, and they don't do it just for fun, because a prototype that integrates a whole new way of cooling 3D chips using liquids has just been shown to the world!


What they have in mind is to have 3D chip stacks, putting chips and memory on a board on top of one another, instead of placing them side by side. Why? To fill the space between the layers with cooling liquid, of course!

Thomas Brunschwiler, project leader at IBM’s Zurich research laboratory, said "As we package chips on top of each other to significantly speed a processor’s capability to process data, we have found that conventional coolers attached to the back of a chip don’t scale. In order to exploit the potential of high-performance 3D chip stacking, we need interlayer cooling. Until now, nobody has demonstrated viable solutions to this problem."

I know it may sound a bit out of this world, but if we think about the fact that the IBM team managed to pipe water into cooling structure as thin as human hair (50 microns), it all starts to make sense. By using the superior thermophysical qualities of water, they reached 180W/sq cm per layer for a 4sq cm stack!

Unfortunately, this is only a lab experiment for now, and since the results were presented at the IEEE ITherm conference in Orlando, Florida, in a paper called "Forced convective interlayer cooling in vertically integrated packages," we're not going to see this solution inside our computers in the near future, but it's good to know such a technology is not that far either...