Diamonds combined with Nvidia GPU turns it into the fastest graphics card ever

Diamonds might prove to be more than just a girl’s best friend as Diamond Foundry tinkers with an Nvidia GPU to create the world’s fastest graphics card.

The race to extract ever greater performance from silicon chips seems endless, but as with everything, there are limits. The more power you cram into a smaller space, the higher the power requirements are – and the more heat it produces. A company called Diamond Foundry is using a novel method to tackle this problem – diamonds.

At the moment, companies such as Intel have been utilizing glass substrates in the production of its chips in an attempt to achieve greater efficiency and improve communication between different chips. Diamond Foundry, meanwhile has spent almost 30 years working on a project that integrates diamond wafer substrates to get premium performance from chips for as long as possible.

Diamond Foundry

Diamond Foundry tested the culmination of its process on an unnamed high-end Nvidia GPU and announced that it led to performance up to three times higher than the best-recorded performance from the same GPU with a normal configuration according to the Wall Street Journal.

These figures have not been subject to normal benchmarking outside of Diamond Foundry itself, so cannot currently be confirmed. However, if the figures are accurate, it would be the fastest graphics card ever made.

New diamond GPU could be 17, 200 times better than what we have now

In order to get these spectacular results, Diamond Foundry utilized a process called heteroepitaxy, which involves creating slightly mismatched crystal layers of substrate. This technology was able to create single-crystal diamonds on scalable substrates, which were then in turn scaled up to create diamond wafers that can be used in chips such as GPUs and CPUs.

The company claims that if it can iron out the imperfections in the process, diamond wafers could be 17,200 times better than silicon, and 60 times better than silicon carbide. That said, there is no word on how long it would be before diamond-powered CPUs and GPUs could make it to market, nor is it clear what the incorporation of diamonds would do to the price point.