ppxl , vor 21 Tagen

@foone I would like to see the CPU Gatling just for shits and giggles

schrockwell , vor 21 Tagen

@foone The BFCPU

smlckz , vor 22 Tagen

@foone Worse idea: make a CPU out of air..

N.B. Oh, it's worse still; there really are logic gates made air (or rather fluid) ((pressure)), see pneumatic logic..

Worst might be where the CPU is a living being solely designed for computational work, where logic gates are implemented using biochemical mechanisms..

LightTheUnicorn , vor 22 Tagen

@foone This manifests in my head as a wooden water wheel with CPUs attached to it, and I'm all for it.

yksteldus , vor 22 Tagen

@foone I'd like to see the slip rings necessary to make that work

curtmack , vor 22 Tagen

@foone "Mechanical limit to cooling" sounds like quitter talk to me. Personally I think we'd have solved this whole "thermodynamics" mess by now if those lily-livers in the physic department had a shred of hustle.

rf , vor 22 Tagen

@foone Fritchens Fritz, who takes a lot of photos of delidded CPU dice, looked at a running Zen 2 chip with no cooler under a thermal cam. The self protection logic keeps moving the work to a less overheated core: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aTYIT2_KEQE

trevorflowers , vor 22 Tagen

@foone If we discover a form of very fast chip but with a finite number of cycles then we'd need a revolver-style speed loader.

PhilipKing , vor 22 Tagen

@foone Pretty sure that the servers at work do this electronically. If a CPU gets hot then others step in while it cools.

FenTiger , vor 22 Tagen

@foone Rather than rotating, have it eject the hot CPUs at high pressure into an outgoing pipe.

The pipe flows through a heatsink, allowing the CPUs to cool to room temperature while still at high pressure.

Next the CPUs pass through an expansion valve, cooling them to below ambient before they are reused.

mothcompute , vor 22 Tagen

@foone in 2024 we are bringing back external cpu cache

vxo , vor 22 Tagen

@foone oh now you're just borrowing from the dark ages

GyrosGeier , vor 22 Tagen

@foone The Windows CPU scheduler actually works that way, if you have only one thread running it will switch it between sockets (if available) and cores every two seconds.

whitequark , vor 22 Tagen

@foone the different kind of "barrel processor"

Hermancy , vor 22 Tagen

@foone

Load thirty CPUs into a special box you can fit into the side of your computer and then if your current CPU gets too hot you can eject it and load the next one. You could have some kind of “bolt action” system to manually eject them or perhaps use the gas build up from heat to eject them semi automatically.

balloonpup , vor 22 Tagen

@foone I'm just imagining a satisfying chunk-click noise as it switches... or perhaps the sound of a room full of them, almost like a telco central office.

gvwilson , vor 22 Tagen

@foone Gatling processors

mu , vor 22 Tagen

@foone if you design it right, and maybe add cooling fins, you could use it as a paddle steamer.

tsturm , vor 22 Tagen

@foone

I know what you're thinking. "Did they use six CPUs or only five?" Well to tell you the truth in all this excitement I kinda lost track myself. But being this is a rotary cooled Z80 system, the most powerful 8-bit computer in the world, you've gotta ask yourself one question: "Do I feel lucky?" Well, do ya, punk?

mizah , vor 22 Tagen

@foone You joke, but... Have you seen how CPUs cyclically throttle up and down in the system monitor?

Pretty sure this is exactly how it works, just not a literal rotary barrel.

slowtiger , vor 22 Tagen

@foone Even better: with Windows Colt˝ the cooling CPUs can install updates without affecing the main unit.

krapp , vor 22 Tagen

@foone If you just spin them all around like fan blades they can all stay cool all the time!

bayindirh , vor 22 Tagen

@foone I know that there's at least one CPU which needs to be idled for a minimum time to limit internal heat stress.

You can have them and cycle them for uninterrupted work.

etchedpixels , vor 22 Tagen

@foone Don't even need that. Some of your limits are on die so you can have multiple instances of a component on the die and cycle them. Whether anyone does I don't know but it would not surprise me.

You can also move jobs between cores on a CPU today for thermal reasons based upon what is throttling although usually you obviously pack to maximise idle cores and power saving.

efi , vor 22 Tagen

@foone that's kinda sorta how multicore works, but with an electronic switch instead of a barrel, so not as strange as it seems