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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.
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!" ;)
However, even (relatively) low-powered components still generate heat, and packing components in more and more densely creates a double whammy by concentrating the heat from all the components in a smaller space and leaving less room for air circulation to cool them. Water-cooling might just be a space-saving measure, not a way to run hyper-fast CPUs.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
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!
If you want to have maximum performance, you'll always use cooling on top of whatever else you're doing. Let me illustrate this by a quote:
The real question is: why would anyone want top performance in a laptop? The damn things are supposed to be reliable and portable, not able to outperform a workstation!
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
"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?)
---
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!)
A) Computers will be obsolete in seven years, so we only need to keep increasing cooling methods until then.
B) The best way to get more performance from a processor is to glue more pins to the outside. This tricks the motherboard into thinking that the processor could be doing so much more if only the motherboard had someplace to stick those extra pins. It will usually kick up the bus speed to make itself feel less inferior. Don't worry about the multiplier. It doesn't tell the processor that it changed the bus speed. They are usually too embarrassed to admit they are working hard. Plus, with all those extra pins to dissipate an electric field, you can just throw water on it if it gets too hot.
I realized how stupid this post is about 1/4 of the way through. I can't stop because I have an itchy posting finger. I'm sorry.
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