AMD announces ATI Theater HD 750 "HDTV on a chip"

Some owners of home theater PCs (HTPCs) want as much of the same experience as a typical cable user as possible, which means they need to install CableCards into their systems to access scrambled digital channels and the like. For those whose TV needs are less demanding, a PC with a TV tuner can get you unscrambled cable channels and over-the-air HD stations. AMD is courting the latter group with the launch of its new ATI Theater HD 750 video chip, which the company promises will provide superior image processing and signal reception compared to its competitors (and, presumably, AMD/ATI’s previous entries in this arena).
The new chipset supports NTSC, ATSC, and ClearQAM broadcast signals to fulfill many of your U.S.-based TV-watching needs, and lets you record broadcasts in such formats as H.264, DivX, and MPEG4. If you make use of Windows Media Center, you can schedule recordings to tape on your hard drive, as well as pause and rewind live TV. None of this is revolutionary stuff, but one novel wrinkle is that if the ATI Theater HD 750 is coupled with an ATI Radeon graphics card, ATI Stream technology (which harnasses a GPU’s processing power for CPU-like tasks) can be used to speed the transcoding process.
AMD hasn’t announced any specific products that will make use of the new chipset, but the company promises that its partners will release them starting later this year and that they’ll take the form of discrete PCI Express cards, USB sticks, and “other” solutions (whatever those turn out to be).

IBM to cool chips with H20

Much like a Porsche boxer engine — only much, much smaller — scientists from the IBM Zurich Research Lab and the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin are working on a microchip that uses micro pipes of water to cool itself, IBM announced this morning.

The chip’s components are built in a three-dimensional stack instead of side-by-side on a silicon wafer. Water is pumped a cooling container (purple in the image above) through the chip’s layers through spaces directly integrated within the chips’ structure (orange, above).

Chips built in a three-dimensional stack formation offer more pathways for info to be processed and can shorten the distance chip information needs to travel by as much as 1000 times, according to Thomas Brunschwiler, a senior engineer in the Advanced Thermal Packaging Group at the IBM Zurich Research Lab who has been working on the chip for almost two years.

The trouble, of course, is that this type of experimental chip structure also generates a large amount of heat. To address the problem, the team has developed a cooling system consisting of micro pipes of water as narrow as 50 microns — about as thin as a strand of human hair — that are interspersed between each chip layer.

To prevent an electrical short, the hair-like water pipes are hermetically sealed from the chip’s other components first with a silicon wall and then a layer of silicon oxide, Brunschwiler said. The scientists used a solder consisting of a mixture of gold and tin, which has a low melting point, to bond the individual pipes from layer to layer without damaging other chip components.

Intended for use in supercomputers, the chip is five to ten years away from being commercially available.

“But before that one would probably see chips with one core layer and a memory layer sitting on top that can still be cooled with outside system,” Brunschwiler said.

It should be noted that this isn’t the first time water has come up on the drawing board for cooling. As many of you are aware, companies like IBM and Hewlett-Packard sell server racks with liquid cooling systems. Researchers at the Tyndall Institute in Cork and the University of Limerick announced in March that they are working on a liquid cooling system incorporated into the packaging that encases chips. And in April IBM announced a supercomputer that uses water alongside its processors to cool them.