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Microcoolers Could Change Processor Design
Skaven writes: "Nature.com is reporting about these nifty new microcoolers, tiny thermoelectric heat sinks that can be built directly onto CPUs. Using the new technology, scientists cooled a processor at 100 degrees C by 7 degrees. That's still a fried t-bird, but what this means is that if the technology gets good enough, cooling chips could soon be getting a lot easier. If anything, small 'hot spots' on the CPU could be avoided by strategic placement of microcoolers, thus helping all of us overclockers out. Heck, maybe even increasing the voltage to your CPU would make it run cooler...how weird would that be?"
the standard overclocking tool, exactly how?
That might sell a lot.
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This article.
This is really cool! (no pun intended)
This has some really far-reaching effects. Where heat was previously one of the prime concerns, it will become less so. I've heard stories of supercooled Pentium II's overclocked to around 1GHz. This could mean an instant increase in processor speeds, without any changes in the actual design. R&D, baby. R&D
Inconceivable!
How is this different from ->
2 22 9
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/16/145
?
I adds a lot of waste heat too. It would be funny to see the web farms have to upgrade their air conditioning plants because their chips require on-board heat disposal. A double whammy. Dissipate an extra 7C, but spend 200W to get it!
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I'm still waiting for a breakthrough in superconductors. Imagine a CPU that can run at extremely high speeds and generate no descernable heat. You wouldn't need a heat sink or fan, making your system run that much quieter.
Now if we could just get harddrives to run silent, we'd be all set (yes, I know about the solid state drives, but they're way too expensive and have too little capacity). Maybe when holographic drives become reality...
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For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
If you read past the first paragraph, it says "the layers can reduce the local temperature on a silicon chip by up to 7 degrees Celsius".
I'm sorry, but that's not going to keep your CPU from turning into bubbly goo.
This would be awesome, overclockers would have to be worried about freezing their chips though, hopefully it never gets that bad...I wonder if these could be inserted in other objects? I think they could make good uses in a lot of things, a battery operated "cool" towel. Just things like that...
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There was a test of an overclocking team who put the motherboard into a freezer. 486dx25 or somesuch. They had the clock speed up to about 200 before it melted into slag.
But people would look at you strange if you had your cables running into a freezer and just used it as a normal computer. wouldn't they?
Okay, got to say it. I wonder what this would do for a beowulf cluster of overclocked computers...
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
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UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
However, the cost of these things isn't mentioned. Judging by the way this article is presented though, it should be relatively cheap to make.
The cooling units consist of 200 alternating layers of two semiconductors stacked atop one another like tiles.
I wonder how many layers you can put on top of each other before it becomes inefficient.
Better yet, make a chip that's 2 pieces, so that each side of the cooling mini-fridges could cool 2 sides. Of course this isn't feasible because of fabrication costs, but hey, it's an idea!
It sounds from the article (which was lacking in technical detail), like the microcoolers can chill the portion of the chip they're in contact with. Okay, I'm good with that. But where does the heat go?
Assuming that it's redistributed, what we're really looking at is a way to take that 1GHz+ CPU and let it run nice and cool while we fry everything else inside the case, right?
A few months ago I saw this article. It concerns making water run up hill so that micro coolers such as these can work in low gravity and zero gravity environments without the need of pumps.
Am I the only one amused that the lead researcher on the project to develop microcooling for electronics is named Xiaofeng Fan? It just happened to catch my eye. :)
If I could only live my life with my threshold at 4...
In a room temperature environment just about any thermal conducting material, even really small ones, will bring something that hot down that little amount. A circuit has to produce a lot of heat to stay at 100 degrees, even flowing air would drop the micro controller down a few degrees. Lets see some tests at closer to room temperature, and then I'll believe in the product.
It is interesting science, though, and makes me wonder if this will lead to efficient cooling devices for non-computing applications. For example, if this were made very efficient, chair-rail air conditioners could become possible (and low-noise too!). Me, I'll wait until the next breakthrough before shouting triumphantly.
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We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
The difference between these is that this one is "a layer of two semiconductors stacked atop one another like tiles" while the other article was about tiny masses of cooling fans. One has moving parts, the other doesn't.
what are you supposed to be overclocking, then? maybe you'd want to overclock your floppy drive... it might run those text-based games a little faster.
Why not just mount the CPU pendicular on the motherboard. I know it would be really easy to break it off then (for frequent box openers) and o lot of pins would have to get on a lot smaller surface but hey now the cpu has 2 sides for cooling instead of 1. Seems like an idea, and since the coolers are quite big those could also be mounted on the motherboard to make it not so easy to break.
An extra 200W for every computer in the state isn't going to make any difference. Buying the distribution system? Well, that's going to solve everything, Mr. Davis. And spending $50mil on consultants to create commercials to cut residential use, so we save maybe 0.2%??? Priceless.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
everybody knows that beer is the best coolant :)
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
Thanks a lot, now I'm gonna have to build a mini-keg ooled by a watercooled peltier. Inspiration can make you do strange things...
Someone oughta mod this up.
need a cooler chip? get a G4.
http://www.clango.org
. . .
Would you still want to use a fan for somethng like this? Would it increase the efficiency of the micro cooler or would it simply be required to move the thermal energy away from the chip and coolers?
It is not enough to succeed, others must fail. - Gore Vidal
This was posted to the Science section last Friday:
link .
You actually run the CPU at the rated speed, you won't need to microcool it.
Thats not necessarily true. If you have the same core and the same bin of processor, but there is still a demand for the proc in a lower speed bin. Then perfectly good higher bin procs are down binned to fill the demand of the lower bin.. so MTBF is the same when you clock it up again. Of course, this isn't always true, but my overclocked Celeron 300A now at 450 seems to be doing just fine after two years.
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
What would you do with a "Peltier-on-a-chip"?
1. Assemble a Beowulf cluster of them.
2. Leech more mp3s from Napster.
3. Bundle censorware with each one (in compliance with Texas law).
4. Leech more mp3s from Napster, but call it "hacktivism".
5. Wintel r00l3z!
6. Cowboy Neal.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
The way I see it, there are still some problems. The heat still has to be moved off the chip, presumably via a heatsink. I guess this technology will help make the cores a bit cooler and therefore be able to run faster. The system that these are in will suffer because of the increased heat. And given the power consumption of Peltier devices, I think that researchers are better off trying to reduce the heat generation through better materials and design rather than strapping a fridge onto the thing. So to simplifiy - generate less not move more
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
That is just what we need...computers that use more electricity. California is have power problems as is. How much would this add to there power problems? I would like to see more chips made that are cooler.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
This reminds me of the saying, "Everything has advanced but toilet paper..." Well everything has advanced in computers but the cooling fan.
Well maby exept the IDE cables, but hey bluetooth is coming out!
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
"If anything, small 'hot spots' on the CPU could be avoided by strategic placement of microcoolers, thus helping all of us overclockers out."
And we all know how much they want to help us overclockers out. Heh.
Would be a real boon to getting a quiet PC, though.
Mucous membranes are the part of your brain that, like, make you think about mucous. --Beavis
Most chips manufactured are created to work at a certain maximum tolerance. If a chip won't test reliably at 1.5 Ghz, it's thrown in a pile of identical chips labeled and sold as 1.4 Ghz.
If these advances allow for reliable on-chip cooling, then you can bet that both AMD and Intel will keep these chips clocked as absolutely high as they'll go, thus eliminating the practice of user overclocking altogether.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Well... I wasn't referring to "overclockers"
This was a corporate effort IIRC. They weren't your average business machines or gaming machines, but high performance computing systems.
Inconceivable!
Well, it's not their serial ports... but you can use the parallel ports and use PLIP -- parallel line internet protocol.e ms/Linux/Hardware_Support/PLIP/
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_Syst
I'm not sure of the licensing issues, but the full journal article can be found on the Applied Physics Online web site, at this URL.
My understanding is that in bulk quantities, beer is cheaper than milk - there are milk marketing boards that set prices on the white stuff. Nobody is doing that for tanker trucks of beer.
From the article:
Heck, maybe even increasing the voltage to your CPU would make it run cooler...how weird would that be?
We learned in physics that it takes energy to move energy. Leaving a refridgerator open will heat up the room eventually (that was actually an exam question, I remember). So putting the microcoolers on/in the chip might allow the chip to run with more stability at higher voltages and clock speeds, but it won't make the chip run cooler. If anything, overclockers will need even bigger heatsinks and peltiers than they're using now to deal with the heat of the chip plus the heat generated by the microcoolers moving heat from the inside of the chip to the outside.
-ck
Forest...trees... The amount of power being used completely unnecessarily by residential users is significant : Maybe it doesn't make a big difference when you consider one single home and you can laugh at initiatives for conservation, but when you consider an entire state it can be substantial. In 1999 there were 11,490,000 households in California. If every one of them replaced a single 100W lightbulb with a 15W compact flourescent, that is 976,650,000W of savings. Do you realize that most nuclear power plants only produce around 100,000,000W? So there you've potentially eliminated the need for >9 nuclear power plants by REPLACING A LIGHTBULB and you're talking about how individual users don't make a difference? Give me a break...
And you say that an extra 200W per PC, or >2,000MW over the state, isn't a big deal. Let me guess : You don't vote because your vote doesn't count, right?
If every one of them replaced a single 100W lightbulb with a 15W compact flourescent, that is 976,650,000W of savings.
You assume that the lightbulb is on all the time, which is incorrect. I hardly have any lights on ever at my place, and most people I know at most use bulbs for a few hours per day - and they're not going to spend a hundred bucks swapping bulbs - those 15W ones are expensive as hell. Telling people to buy them at an added cost to them - less beer, for example - without raising the price accordingly flies in the face of the economics upon which your country was built.
Not to say conversion isn't a good thing, but the reason people waste power IS BECAUSE THE PRICE IS ARTIFICIALLY LOW. If you want people to use less power, for god's sake, just RAISE THE PRICE. That's capitialism, aren't you guys the united states of america? The supply falls, the price rises, more people will want to build power stations - but oh, wait, you've gone and fucked yourselves with environmental legislation that flies in the face of reality. You SHOULD have several more nuclear power plants, or hydro, or coal, or whatever, if you want to sustain the current price to consumers.
You can buy all the power you want from us in Canada - it just isn't going to be cheap. Raise the price, and watch all those 15W bulbs fly off the shelves. Lower the enviromental regulations, and build some power plants. Just wait until people start using their A/C in summer - you have lots of people, well, you get lots of pollution to match.
..don't panic
"Funny" is not usually something thought of as being posessed. Usually you need a noun for possessives: "his shirt", "her car", "their country".
Now if the intent was to talk about "people who think that they are funny", one might want to use a contraction (which generally is frowned up on in written communications) to say something like "people who think that they're funny". Dropping the "that" is probably fine for an informal forum such as this.
One benifit of avoiding contractions (and their apostrophies) is that you can avoid the confusion between "it's" (contraction of "it is") and "its" (possessive of "it").
Of course none of this is on topic...
You assume that the lightbulb is on all the time, which is incorrect. I hardly have any lights on ever at my place, and most people I know at most use bulbs for a few hours per day - and they're not going to spend a hundred bucks swapping bulbs - those 15W ones are expensive as hell.
Ah but therein lies the crunch : Most of the power system in place is to deal with momentary peaks because people do tend to all do the same things at the same time: Everyone cranks their ovens on at the same time, and generally at the same time AC powers up (and of course in warmer places like California every W of lighting turns into a W of heat that the AC has to remove from the air). At common times a good portion of the population has their hairdriers on in the morning, and their water heaters come on because they had a shower. Every W that is piled on top of that load is a W that has to be accomodated in the power grid.
Having said that a couple of quick points
Tell people to conserve, but don't make up faulty data to support your claim.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
The point of these isn't for you to go buy them and put it on your chip to overclock it. Chip manufacturers like Intel and AMD can build these into a chip in order to keep it cooler, and therefore they can make faster chips. The reason you don't have heat problems unless you overclock is because Intel and AMD design the chips so that they will not overheat at their rated speed, but in order to keep making faster chips they need to keep finding ways to better cool the chips. Heatsinks and fans work for now, but as chips get faster, cooling will need to improve, and this is supposed to help in that.
I believe rw2's point is that the room was at room temperature, the chip or whatever was at 100C, and when the cooling thing was activated, the chip cooled by 7C. And he's right, that's not especially impressive. But then again, rw2 is missing the bigger point made in the Nature article, that this is something new and people are just getting their feet wet. rw2: give it a couple years and maybe they'll be able to drop the temperature by 50C.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
... something like
"who the hell overclocked this comp ? we are freezing to death !"
People in the know about overclocking have been using this technology for years except in a larger scale. The problem is for every BTU of heat removed from one side of the device you create 2 BTU of heat on the other side so cooling the peltier or "micro cooler" itself becomes the problem. They're also expensive, making the $960 dual Athlon boards seem like biologist feed.
I read a different article on this (don't have link, sorry) that suggested that these would be used to move heat between different regions of a chip. For example, cool a very hot ALU by dumping the heat elsewhere. Before you say that's stupid, in reality a more even heat distribution would decrease the maximum temperature of any given point on the chip, allowing it to run hotter on average (and hence faster). Also, it makes it easier to cool, as a greater region is in contact with the heat sink.
Which ones are you using? Visible light output is measured in lumens and if two lights are a given lumen output they are measurabley and visibly putting out the same amount of light. The current 15W compact-flourescents put out the same lumens as a 75W incandescent.
If you mean quality of light I greatly disagree : I find that compact flourescents put out whiter, more natural light. There is no flicker with CFs.
just right for when you need to carry that microbrew beer around but don't want the hassle of a regular sized cooler.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
People have been waiting for this for many a year and nothing has come of it. I remember reading that it required supercooled nitrogen which is not exactly ecconomical.
Right, but what I'm referring to are high temperature superconductors. If some day a way is determined to create such things, the liquid nitrogen will be unnecessary.
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For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
You must not have any SCSI drives!
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
:::grumble::: They're not kidding... Of 3 T-birds I've seen, 2 melted! Guess it's the high price/high stability/low performace of Intel vs. the low price/low stability/high performance of AMD. Go figure.
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
..........i'm sorry, you've already reported this one. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/16/145222 9 . Next!
Feel that power? That's mah MOUSING FINGER
Hey, Great post... first of all. Cooling by increasing voltage is not weird at all! Think about it. When you double your voltage, the amount of current necessary to do the same work, gets cut in half. Now if you remember your science classes, 2x the current = 2x the heat. 20 AMPS will be twice as hot as 10 AMPS (not exactly, I don't have my electro-thermal equations handy). Therefore the gauge of the wire carrying the current can be smaller. Since it takes 60 AMPS of 110v to run the average external AC unit(for example) you can save copper and make it more robust by running the AC unit on 220v with 30 AMP wire (as long as you don't live in San Francisco...hehehe). Higher voltage is always preferable to low voltage high current. Motors last longer etc. because the copper is less susceptible to heat damage. The down side to high voltage is that it is more dangerous. It arcs easier etc. and kills much more completely, faster. Don't get me wrong, with enough current, 1 volt can kill you just as dead as 50,000 volts, depending on the current. That is what kills... High voltage scrambles neurons more than it burns, unless the current is high. You can get knocked out by your ignition coil on your car, but it can't fry your arm off (at least you wouldn't be able to hold that on your arm anyway). Why? Low current. High voltage and high current are a deadly mix indeed. 50,000 volts at 500,000 amps will vaporize you from 1 foot away. You don't even need to touch it. That is why power companies use high tension wires... they are cooler and the electricity suffers less loss (through heat). Hope this clarified that whole thing a bit. I am not an electrical engineer (I am just another programmer...), but worked in an electrical motor shop during college. I used to know the equations. L8, Neil
I just printed this post and followed your advice, all over it.
Another interesting property the Peltier element has is that it can convert heat into electricity. So could you have them drive the fans, etc. to a degree? You could save a little energy that way, but it would add up in the long run.
Not sure if it will make a big difference in the long run, but the general trend is (if I can remember from my physics classes...anyone verify this?) good thermal conductors are good electrical conductors. This presents obvious problems if you try and make these things too big. Also, from a design standpoint, does this serverly limit the way chips can be built around these thermal conductors? Also, the cooling capacity is a function of surface area...perhaps a design can be made that can dissipate more (via more surface area). Comments?
You do see whats coming don't you?
All we need to do now is create micro-mice and micro-mice wheels and I'll be able to power my house with mouse pellets.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
does no one else have a little box that shows all the science news? This story was already posted: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/16/145222 9
its even the exact same news source!
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
I heard a talk from someone working in this field. I don't know if he called it a Peltier pump, but here's how it went:
;)
You take a stack of conductor (read: metal), semiconductor (read: not so conductive as a metal), conductor, semiconductor and so forth and so on. Basically (in energy terms) the conductor forms the valleys and the semiconductor froms the mountains forming a hilly landscape. (Just like a crossection of an egg-box.) All electrons are in the valleys. Some of the electrons move fast and are called "hot" and some move slow "cold". (a bit crude difference since it is a gaussian distibution bla bla bla...)
When a potential is applied over this stack, all electrons want to go over the mountans, but the "cold" electrons cannot pass them since they have too little energy and the "hot" ones can. The "hot" ones end up at one end and the cold ones are left at other end, respectively giving a "hot" and a "cold" side.
But it is far from being a sellable product. One of them being: Resistance. Resistance heats up the system making every electron "hot" and thus ruining the effect. They also had problems with electron orbital resonance effects, but I'm not going into detail there...
Hope this helps
It doesn't matter if it only moves the heat a small distance.. it still moves it. If you touch a surface with your finger, it doesn't matter if the material 1 mm down is at a thousand degrees.... if the surface you are touching is at 0 degrees, it'll feel cold. Period.
Peltier devices move heat away from one side to the other side.. and they also generate heat (which ends up on the hot side of course). That's why there is always a point where it's generating more heat than it can move, and becomes inefficient.
The point is, it moves heat away from the chip surface faster and more reliably.. that heat still has to be bled off with a heat sink/fan/whatever.
Has already been done: covered on /. ...Okay, I admit it: it's not a keg.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
And you misspelled "benefit". Oh, and it should be "MY country". Jackass.
You realize, of course, that it takes more electricity to manufacture a single compact florescent bulb than ten standard bulbs will use during their entire lifetimes. Not quite the green solution you thought it was, eh?
Where did this little factoid come from, because it sure sounds like a bunch of bullshit FUD. Lightbulbs use an enormous amount of energy, and comparatively the energy to manufacture is trivial (most CFs rate themselves for 10,000 hours of use, so a 20W instead of a 100W saved 800KWh over the lifetime. It takes 800KWh to create a CF (and I'm excluding subtracting the cost to make 10 regular lightbulbs because your point is so ridiculously silly it isn't worth the point)? You're an idiot). Let me guess : You work at an incandescent light plant and seeing your job in doubt you start up the FUD engine. Crawl back in your hole idiot.
For some reason the "their/there/they're" and the "your/you're" confusion causes me to go nuts. It probably has to do with the way I read things - those errors are so obviously wrong to me I can't understand how they can be made by people. I suppose that my spelling errors cause the same reactions in some other readers.
How I managed to put a space in "upon" is beyond me. I have no idea why someone would think that "their country" is a bad example. When talking about "those four Germans" one might also want to talk about "their country".