According to this Byte and Switch report, the U.S. Department of Energy's assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, Alexander Karsner, told the industry to pick up the pace during the IT Infrastructure Conference on Climate Change at the United Nations yesterday. Now that we know the problem is.

Aside from his astute observation, IBM let slip a technology they're planning for upcoming Cell chips during the conference.

"There's innovation at the atomic level," said Rich Lechner, IBM's vice president of IT optimization, during a panel discussion, explaining that the vendor is currently developing a cooling technology called Airgap, which tackles heat generation at the processor level.

"We're injecting atomic layers of air between the processors -- that will increase dissipation of heat by 40 percent," Lechner claims. This will be available on IBM's cell processors sometime in the next 12 to 24 months, and it eventually will be extended to the vendor's other chip technologies.

Interesting times ahead...