> In a frontside design, the silicon substrate can be as thick as 750 micrometers. Because silicon conducts heat well, this relatively bulky layer helps control hot spots by spreading heat from the transistors laterally. Adding backside technologies, however, requires thinning the substrate to about 1 mm to provide access to the transistors from the back.

This is a typo here, right? 1mm is thicker, not thinner, than 750 micrometers. I assume 1µm was meant?

Whose gonna pull the trigger on beryllium oxide mounting packages first?

Its the holy grail of having thermal conductivity somewhere between aluminum and copper, while being as electrically insulating as ceramic. You can put the silicon die directly on it.

Problem is that the dust from it is terrifyingly toxic, but in it's finished form it's "safe to handle".

The article mentions backside (underside) power distribution, capacitors to help regulate voltage (thus allowing tighter tolerances and lower voltage / operating power), voltage regulation under the chip, and finally dual-layer stacking with the above as potential avenues to spread heat dissipation.

I can't help but wonder, where exactly is that heat supposed to go on the underside of the chip? Modern CPUs practical float atop a bed of nails.

We could also explore the idea that Von Neumann's architecture isn't the best choice the future. Having trillions of transistors just waiting their turn to hand off data as fast as possible doesn't seem same to me.

One game that can be played is to use isotopically pure Si-28 in place of natural silicon. The thermal conductivity of Si-28 is 10% higher than natural Si at room temperature (but 8x higher at 26 K).