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Water-Cooled Laptops From Toshiba
dan the person writes: "Toshiba's latest 0.75 inch thick laptop features a watercooled processor. Watercooling is no longer just for hardcore overclockers. " Not many details along with this - if you know more, please post links below.
Yeah, Crusoe running at 700Mhz is only as fast as a PII at 450 or so. Still way more power than you need to do a presentation with PowerPoint. How much processing power do you think it takes to blit the screen with a new slide, even with the fancy transition effects you don't use even a fraction of that processer power you are paying for with battery life.
Also, your wording is interesting: Slow and long, fast but shorter.
Perhaps more accuratly: Unnoticably slower and several hours of work, or uselessly faster and only a little over an hour worth of work (but you can fry eggs on it while you are working!).
It's your decision.
I read the internet for the articles.
Great, a new thin laptop from Toshiba. But it's still full size in the other dimensions. I'm looking for a replacement for my aging Libretto, but Toshiba don't seem interested in bringing out new models with a Libretto-like form factor any more. The only other alternative at the moment is the smaller Sony Vaio models, which I don't like as much, and don't exactly have a stellar spec anyway, particularly for the price. Sigh. I hate the non-upgradability of laptops. I've put a 6GB disk in the Libretto, but the CPU is soldered directly to the motherboard, and I'm at the maximum memory it'll handle already :-(
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
What's the copper pipe in Dell Latitude containing? Is it just a thermal conductor.
I wondered the same thing about the cooling system in my Dell Inspiron 3700. I looked on Dell's site for some detailed technical specs or white papers, but came up empty. My speculation is that it's just air (in which case, you probably move more heat by conduction through the copper pipe). Water would be more effective, but you'd have to ensure that the thing didn't leak. But air might be enough -- you don't have to pipe away all the heat from the CPU, just enough to keep it within tolerance.
Whatever it is, it seems effective. When the fan comes on, the exhaust air is very warm.
--Jim
Portege notebooks (I'm typing this on a 3010 right now) are magnesium. They are using the water cooling system to tramsit the heat to the case.
naturally, if you spread the heat out over a larger area, it dissipates better and doesn't make any one part of the case hot.
The 3010 I'm using right now is a far cry from the new one, uses a 266mhz mobile pentium mmx. It gets a little warm, but i wouldn't say hot.
But really, who needs even the cpu in that thing? I'll keep this portege 3010 until I can get something of equal weight that gives me longer battery life, even if it's the same speed or only a little faster.
Yes, I'm anxious to see a Transmeta based ultraportable, but not because i wan to buy one. I'm anxious because I'll believe the hype when i can talk to someone who's owned one for six months, and then maybe I'll be able to decide if it would be better than what I'm using now.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
Here is a nice page with a great picture of the Dreamcast cooling system.
If the Dreamcast liquid cooling system is similar to the one in the 3440CT, you can see why they might want it: it is flat. The 3440 itself is really, really thin. (There are pictures of it on Toshiba's site.)
I was under the impression that the Hitachi processor in the Dreamcast was water cooled. IIRC, it was supposed to be prototype only, but the one I have (European, so it would be the third or so revision of the system) it seems to make a sound indicative of an internal watercooler when I switch it on.
I hope more companies will see the light and produce StrongARM and Crusoe based Laptops. Those chips use much less power and run Linux, so what more do you need?
Windows support for the other 99% of the world.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
The cooling units on water-cooled mainframes I have worked with were *not* portable. Water was pumped around to a cooling unit and back again in a closed circuit. I think the circuit did need topping up occasionally, though.
The whole unit weighed the best part of a ton. There were two independent circuits in case one fell out.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Maybe this technology will see a return to the old practice of congregating around the water cooler/bubbler/whatever-regional-word-you-use, which has been so neglected in recent years with people wasting their time on the internet instead. Heavens knows, if you have to refill this thing, it won't be with tap water, and while geeks tend to stop being cheap when it comes to buying/maintaining computer hardware, it's just not as sexy to have to pick up distilled water from the grocery store.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
I've certainly spent time curled up with a laptop balanced on my knees, which would make up sideways.
I used to work in a bank with watercooled IBM mainframes. One day there was a catastrophic system failure which turned out to be caused by a plumber working in the mens washrooms. No prizes for guessing which stopcock he turned off by mistake...
While it would be cool to have a computer that would realy sizzle the real problem with beter/faster/hotter is that the heat has to go somewhere. I've got an old Sparc Tadpole 1 laptop. When its sleeping in charge mode it stays warm enough to for the cat to consider it a bed. When its running you can use the thing has a battery operated camp stove and I don't ever run it at full speed. It sounds like some of the new devices will need to come with a warning sticker "Warning Contents Hot -- Do not remove the lid"...oh wait thats just for coffee
I wonder if the same thing is going to happen to these machines that happened to IBM's water-cooled mainframes.
The machines themselves would become obsolete but the cooling mechanism started becoming extremely valuable, sometimes to the point of costing more then the original machine. To keep older machines running after IBM discontinued the line mainframe owners would start searching for old machines to salvage the water-cooling parts. I believe I read that those parts had a very strong auction market for them.
Evidently water-cooling isn't very cost efficient compared to other ways of increasing CPU output. What they are doing now is shrinking the circuits but we already know that Intel can't keep doing that forever. What else is left to squeeze more power out of a given CPU design besides cooling?
My question is, how is the water-vapor circulated around the case and what happens if there is a leak?
Mith
We the Sheeple...
I maintain that your original statement was ludicrous.
I give all my presenations on an old 166mhz thinkpad. Compiling the program in a presentation??? Nobody ever wants to see that, and why would they? Can you explain why a Crusoe that performs as fast as a PIII 500 is not good enough for playing a quicktime movie or a simple PowerPoint animation? I'd say the examples you cite, including compiling, comprise the most processor-intensive segment of the stuff I do at work, yet it all works just fine on my workstations and laptops that run about half as fast as the Crusoe.
-JD
Most people don't have computers based on a vaporware processor, however.
I don't know what you call vaporware. The term is popularly defined as a product which has been publicly announced, but not implemented, tested or released.
Transmeta's Crusoe is the opposite of vaporware, since they specifically did not publicize it until they had a working product.
-JD
I remember that was the coolant of choice for IBM mainframes in the '80s. Although that might have been just for the loop to the rooftop heat exchanger, it seems like it had some properties that improved the amount of heat transferred.
From what I understand and have been told this uses almost the exact same method as the Sega Dreamcast. In fact, it has been rumored that it is possible to remove the watercooling system from the dreamcast and install it in one of the larger Toshiba laptops with a bit of hackery. But I've never seen it done, so I have my doubts.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
No it would just have better uptime. :)
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Wow ! now there is something else you can blaim when you spill the coffee/jolt/coke on the keyboard and it fries the motherboard/cpu !
Someday, we'll look back on this, laugh nervously and change the subject.
Actually the heat pipe on the Dell contains distilled water - Dell first used it on the Latitude CP (early '98 if I remember correctly). I do not know if that is mentioned anywhere on the website, but I was a tech for Dell when the system came out.
Here are some links that might be useful:
Press Release for the 3440CT
Press Release about the cooling technology
meisenstGreen's Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
I think the Cray 2 wins the prize for the most effort required in cooling a commercially available system
The entire system was filled with fluorinert, which was pumped around the processor boards to cool them. The fluorinert got so hot it needed to be cooled by water, which was done in an external heat-exchanger. The water was then cooled by air, pumped into yet another heat-exchanger. The air was often cooled by separate air-con systems.
Quite often, the installation cost more than the machine itself!
Crusoe is also slower. Everything is based on tradeoffs. What do you want? Slow and long, fast but shorter.
Business laptops today need high performance power to do presentations through a video projector. These will probably be plugged into a wall jack, so battery life won't be as big a factor in that.
The solution is not to use slower technology.
Mike DeMaria
Yes, I understand about distillation column, how else will I make home booz exactly? But even in the fridges you have to add freon or some other gases for it to continue working. I don't know if the guys who build laptops are better at this than the guys who build fridges but some evaporation is going to happen. Also I would like to know how they combat the problem with external air that may concentrate into water on the internals of the laptop. This wouldn't be good for CPU or your harddrive (or anything else there.) It's going to be an interesting experiment. I'll wait buying anything like that in a laptop for a while.
You can't handle the truth.
So it's low pressure water vapor. Does anyone know how this works, is it that the CPU and other devices basically evaporate water from containers by heating them up? Then over time, when there is too much heat, wouldn't the pressure change? To keep the pressure constant wouldn't they have to release some vapor from the laptop? Imagine, a laptop with a whistle:
-I can hear your kettle whistling.
-Oh, no, it's just my Toshiba laptop.
-More tea?
And do they have to add liquids to the laptop over time or they will never really evaporate into air?
So many questions and a short life.
You can't handle the truth.
Fight Spammers!
You are omitting a large segment of the notebook-using population: engineers and scientists, who need serious computer power while on the road.
I've gone to the field for many a test and seen a veritable forest of high-power laptops in a small room in the middle of some godforsaken desert; as often as not, these notebook computers have large screens, running at very high resolutions. Myself, I need to do CAD, run various engineering and simulation software packages, and produce presentation packages and reports while using many apps simultaneously; I therefore need a large screen and a serious FPU... 1024x768 isn't really big enough, so my new notebook will run at least 1280x1024, and higher if I can manage it. I also need plenty of RAM (I'm at 140MB now, and it's marginal) and an OS that doesn't choke on a dozen open apps at once. In short, I need a desktop machine I can carry.
While I (and the other engineers I know) do use notebook computers on airplanes and in other places away from convenient power, we've found this curious little phenomenon known as extra batteries. It's a small price to pay for the ability to do in the field what I normally do in the office, on my main machine. Then again, many airliners are now equipped with power receptacles -- the ideal solution.
While I agree than many (even most) notebook users won't need extraordinary measures like water-cooled processors, there are some of us who will gladly accept whatever it takes to keep our powerful machines working. I remember my first high-end notebook, a number of years back: it cost me a cool seven large bills, and it paid for itself in less than a month. Progress for me is whatever it takes to keep that sort of trend going, and Transmeta isn't going to be part of it.
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Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton
Incidentally, it would be rather strange if the laptop was not sealed well anymore after a couple of years of use. One would have to go to tech support and say, "Sir, my laptop is sweating! I am sure it has fever!" ;)
Just think... when the water gets too hot, you can use it to make coffee. As long as you don't have to crack open the CPU to get at it; the silicon adds a bitter aftertaste, particularly on milder blends, such as Colombian. Which I probably spelt wrong.
Question: would the computer work faster if you used Jolt instead of water?
Disagree with conclusions & reasoning re: use of StrongARM or indeed any non-FPU'd processor on laptops.
Look around you. Who buys laptops or PDAs?:
I'd suggest that most portable computer devices are bought for "corporate" usage. People buying sub-laptop devices (from WinCE boxen thru Palm and onwards (Psion! Psion! Psion!)) are buying them for applications not games. People buying Laptops are more likely to be corporate purchasers than individuals. Believe me, corporations don't care phht! for quake3 FPS rates.
So, I'd argue that the market for low-wattage processors (and disks, and displays etc) for the mobile market is FAR greater than the market for high-MFLOPs mobile processors. Personally speaking I'd trade my (company supplied, very flash but HEAVY) Stinkpad for a Crusoe win-Alike or even Psion S7 sized box - as long as it runs my applications. Whether they play games or not is absolutely irrelevent to my or my employer. They're lighter, and they run longer... just the attributes you want in a portable device.
So this whole water-cooled laptops to me is just plain WRONG. My Laptop is heavy enough and fragile enough as it stands - adding sloshing fluids and fragile radiators to the mass of glass, spinning disks and fans is *not* progress, people.
A fan. In a laptop. Get this: my battery-powered computer wastes it's power running a fan to stop itself from overheating because of it's power-hungry CPU - what could be more ridiculous? I get 1.5 - 2 hours battery life out of it, and think I've got a winner. It weighs ~3KG.
Meanwhile, my *personal* PDA, a Psion 5MX, weighs ~0.5KG, runs off 2 x AA batteries for 25 hours, and *still* lets me surf the net, send/receive emails, write word documents, run spreadsheets, organise my life, balance my checkbook etc etc etc.... Guess which one of the above I'd ditch?
Oh yeah, and a footnote: an FPU is (generally) only useful for 3D games anyway. Strategy, platform, adventure games etc etc etc don't make heavy use of the FPU. I can quite happily play "Monopoly", "The Sims", most of the real-time strategy etc games on my hypothetical non-FPU'd laptop with little to no performance loss compared to a traditional beast. Except of course that my more-modern CPU design will be happily sleeping between turns, and generally saving my batteries for when I really need them.
Sorry, this has become very long and unstructured. Mark this one up to "passionate response" and move on. Nothing to see here.
--
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
"Water cooled" makes it sound like these Toshibas are the Porches of the laptop world (as opposed to the air cooled VWs). What we're probably talking about here are heat pipes based on water (it happens to have a really high heat of vaporization, the right viscosity, and a big change in contact angle- for the meniscus). They've been used in laptops for years, mostly to get heat up on that big fin called a screen that you flip up whenever you use one.
:^)
Check out: http://www.cheresources.com/htpipes.shtml
for more info on how these guys work. The key deal is that they don't require a pump to move the water, 'cause the heat does that work itself
My experience is with the silicon micromachined versions of these. There are all sorts of problems they can develop (angle sensitivity, vapor lock...), but comercial versions work well, and have been around for decades, though they're not as small as you'ld like.
Currently folks at Stanford are working on electro-osmotic pumps for these exchangers to increase their efficiency/size ratio:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/micr oheat/hex.html
(use google if stanford fails to load like it did for me).
enjoy,
Kurth
Business laptops today need high performance power to do presentations through a video projector.
Someone ought to moderate up that as "funny".
Have you ever done a presentation through a video projector? One slide at a time. Click, click. Yeah, lots of computing power needed there.
If you want a gaming computer, pay the extra two thousand clams. On the other hand, if like most people you aren't wasting your time and money, you get the computer that makes the most sense. For people doing actual work, Crusoe gives the best of both worlds, hardly a big sacrifice or tradeoff.
-JD
Well, as I understood it, the StrongARM chips will NEVER be used in consumer computers (not including palmtops) for the simple fact that the StrongARM family of processors are designed without floating point units. The lack of a floating point unit (meaning all floating point calculations would have to be done in software) would not be all that large of a burdon for typical business applications, but it would make it completely and utterly useless for any sort of game. While gaming is usually not the focus of most laptop owners, I doubt that any laptop without gaming capability would ever become more than a special-use product.
The Crusoe processor, when released, should allow for designs for laptops and notebook computers that were not availible until now because of power limitations, but I believe that because of the inherent tradeoffs involved in a technology such as Transmeta's code-morphing techniques, the performance of the Crusoe chips will be less constant and reliable than a 'hard-wired' processor, as it were. You may notice that of all the claims that Transmeta has made about the Crusoe chip, first-class performance is NOT one of them. They claim on their web page to support speeds up to 700Mhz in the Crusoe chip, however, as people are beginning to discover, clock speed is never the whole issue. I wish I could remember the original reference, but it has been suggested (and yes, I feel bad for not being able to cite this) that a 700Mhz Crusoe would be equivilent to a 450Mhz PIII (not mobile). While at the moment, this seems like a very nice speed, note that there are NO products using the Crusoe chip today, and PIII 450Mhz machines are availible to purchase today. Assuming that it will be another 3-6 months before a Crusoe laptop hits the market, it's pretty clear that at least in the near term, the Crusoe is going to be a whole level down in the performance race. However, if you NEED 6-8 hours of battery life, the Crusoe chip MAY be the way to go.
Another good possibility is the Motorola/IBM PowerPC series of processors. The PowerPCs have, in general, been in the 4-6 watt range. The PPC 7400 (AKA G4), according the Motorola's data sheets, eats about 5 watts at 400Mhz, at 'typical' usage. This should get even lower as Motorola moves to a smaller fabrication size. The low power requirements of the PowerPC processors have allowed Apple to be able to produce laptops and desktops with identical processors (and even motherboards! The iMacs and PowerBooks use the same motherboards, with SMALL differences).
Don't forget, as well, that power consumption of the processor is only one piece of the puzzle in a laptop. With displays getting bigger, rather than smaller, unless the efficiency of LCD displays gets a big boost in the near future, the power consumption of the LCD display is going to get enormous. Don't forget, the difference in area between a 14" and 15" (viewable) screen is not 7%, but around 15%! As it is, in my Apple PowerBook, the screen takes up OVER half of the power consumption. Hard drives, as well, are a factor, as are any other peripherals within the laptop.
Anyways, hopefully after reading this, you'll realize that the problems in practical portable computing and battery life won't just be solved by dropping in a new, lower powered processor. Wow... I didn't mean for this to ramble so long.
The (pdf) spec sheet for the 3440ct is here.
I don't see anything about being watercooled, though most of the other facts in the article seem right ( less than 1" thick, 500Mhz Mobile PIII, 3.4 lbs)
Work for Change & GET PAID!
"Are you incontinent, or it is just your Toshiba leaking?"
- Press release
That's about it. Their has no apparent mention of the new model as of yet.The press release is equally vague about the tech, but does mention that there's a patent pending, and that it's similar to how car engines are cooled. (Isn't that prior art?)
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How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
It appears that the "water cooling" they're talking about is just a heat pipe -- something that has definitely been used in laptops before when fans are unusable.
.. it sounds like Toshiba just spread the heat out to more places to dissipate it in a small form-factor machine). The water then circulates back to the heat source by capillary action in the wick and starts the cycle over.
:)
The idea behind them is that a small conductive pipe contains a concentric "wick" as well as water vapor. Heat is conducted from the processor to the end of the pipe which then heats the internal vapor and causes it to circulate down the pipe around the wick. The heat is usually sucked out of the pipe at the other end by something big and metal (at least some laptops use metal plates behind the screen
They're pretty neat. I burned my fingers with one when I stupidly stuck it in a cup of coffee once
(first post, btw. woo!)
Water cooled laptops. I think we're starting to see the death of the x86 architechture in mobiles if we have to resort to the mechanical complexities of a liquid cooling system in order to keep clocks up. Although it's fascinating stuff, I don't want one of those in charge of my data.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Its probably a heat pipe. Heat pipes work by convection, not conduction. See www.heatpipe.com (really!) for a pretty good explaination.
It would have to be very strong in order to prevent the tube containing the water from breaking and damaging components. You can't fit much in a 0.75in package, including a proper water-cooled processor.
This Toshiba would have one that's pretty inefficent because there's no indication that there's a refrigerator in it. The water would get hot over time and eventually the processor would be heated up more, not cooled down. Unless there was a slot for you to add more water, that is.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
my powerbook g3-333 (1999) has a bent tube containting water attached to the underside of the cpu heatsink/shield. I believe it was actually first used in a compaq circa 97. 1st water cooled laptop.... pahleeeze