If you look at the wafer she’s holding at the top, it’s seemingly segmented into a 12x7 grid of roughly chip-sized rectangles. That’s 84 “CPUs” at 200-240 watts each, which is pretty well in line with discrete server CPUs.
The amount of heat coming off this thing must be amazing, though.
It may be a very large wafer but dissipating that heat is still very impressive.
That said, I'd be fascinated to see the cooling solution. Is it just a massive copper heatsink & a boatload of airflow? Typical approaches of using heatpipes to expand the heatsink won't really work with something this big after all. Or is it a massive waterblock with multiple inlets/outlets so it can hit up a stack of radiators? How do they get even mounting pressure across that large of an area?
"To solve the 70-year-old problem of wafer-scale, we needed not only to yield a big chip, but to invent new mechanisms for powering, packaging, and cooling it.
The traditional method of powering a chip from its edges creates too much dissipation at a large chip’s center. To prevent this, CS-2’s innovative design delivers power perpendicularly to each core.
To uniformly cool the entire wafer, pumps inside CS-2 move water across the back of the WSE-2, then into a heat exchanger where the internal water is cooled by either cold datacenter water or air."
(more than the IEEE)
This thing pulls 15-20kW of juice!