Well, just look at Butterfly labs, lol

But seriously - one thing that might be interesting to see done is have the chips simply run at higher temperatures.  The greater the difference in temp between the heatsink and the air, the higher the rate of energy transfer to the air.

It seems like there are two limiting factors, first the operating temp of the IC itself, since the resistance changes as it gets hot, chips will stop working properly - but couldn't you design the chip to operate correctly at higher resistance levels? "Millitary grade" ICs are rated to 125°C.  for example.

The other problem is simply the solder holding the chip on the board, lead free solder melts at around 200°C,  apparently.   But couldn't you design a package using a different material, like gold?  If you look at modern socketed Intel chips they have gold pins on the board, and simple flat areas the pins connect too.  The sockets are probably attached to the boards using BGA, of course but couldn't you put gold contacts on the board and attach the chip some other way?

One thing I think is cool about bitcoin is the fact that because the chip design is simple, it probably takes a lot less effort to actually design the IC itself, which can mean faster cycle times to innovate new technology more quickly then with other kinds of technology that gets made on the bleeding edge of IC tech, like CPUs and GPUs. (I think I've mentioned this a couple times before)


He's making a joke about the fact that if you google hashfast, you find marijuana related material