Martin and his fellow researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania have a different plan for all of those power-hungry transistors. “We said, ‘Maybe it’s OK to use them all, just don’t use them very long,’” he explains.
The group believes that microprocessors can reach a new level of performance if we built them to sprint rather than jog — if we juice them to seemingly insane levels and then give them time to rest, before juicing them back up again. The wax — or paraffin — is there to keep them from overheating during these intermittent sprints.
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