The urgency of deep sub-ambient cooling for gigascale integration

It is shown that the performance of GSI chips will not be a function of how many transistors are integrated in a chip and how fast they can potentially switch; rather, it will be determined by how many transistors can switch per unit time. By lowering the energy per binary switching operation, liquid-air cooling can improve the performance of a power-limited chip by more than 6 generations of technology (more than 13×), significantly lower tunneling and leakage power dissipations (100× and 3.5×, respectively), and improve the performance and reliability of interconnects.