High performance 3D stacked DRAM processor architectures with micro-fluidic cooling

In this work we consider new 3D IC processor architectures that become feasible only when aggressive cooling is used. In traditional air cooled 3D processors, heat removal is a big issue, and so designers often pursue low performance architectures in order to prevent thermal violations. We attempt to explore the new design space that is available to computer architects when micro-fluidic cooling is applied to the 3D chip. We show that adding more memory controllers to a 3D processor can offer the potential for huge increases in performance, but also drastically increases the temperature of an uncooled chip, making them infeasible. With micro-fluidic cooling, these performance increases become realizable and new high performance architectures can be designed when cooling is co-designed with the architecture. We observe a 2.4x increase in average performance when comparing a 3D stacked memory processor with and without micro-fluidic cooling. This performance increase occurs because the cooling unlocks the possibility of adding more memory controllers as well as more aggressive frequency scaling. Cooling also improves the energy efficiency of the processors since a slight increase in cooling power helps to significantly reduce the leakage levels. This combined with improvements in performance due to aggressive cooling helps to increase energy efficiency on average 16.8x.