IBM powers PCs with ‘electronic blood’

As technology continuously speeds up its pace of development so does the rate at which it consumes energy.

Engineers working at the world’s largest tech companies will soon have to face the reality that super-computers are eating more energy and power than they can feed into them.

The first step to solving this problem, for IBM engineers, was to turn to a super-machine nested in our own bodies: the human brain.

Because the brain makes use of a network of blood vessels to transport both energy and heat simultaneously, it is more efficient than any computer used today.

The same principle applies to IBM’s new computer-powering technology which, although years away from being widely implemented, has proved to be more efficient.

The technology named ‘electronic blood’ consists of a fluid charged with electrical current which, upon reaching the computer’s processors cools and powers them at the same time.

Nowadays computers are so big mostly because they generate so much heat that their chips have to keep a distance from one another. In addition, cooling devices like fans also occupy a lot of space.

If IBM technology is to be implemented, the size of computers will become pocket-sized: ‘What we want to do is to make water-cooled supercomputers of the future that are the size of a sugar cube,’ said Chris Sciacca, spokesman for IBM Research.

At the moment, the world’s most powerful computer stretches to the size of half a football field. However, IBM says that, with it’s new technology, that size could be reduced to that of a normal desktop computer.