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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?"
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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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.
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.
So far as I can tell, the 'hot' side is much closer to the 'cold' side. How this helps is certainly beyond me.
Did anyone else wonder how on earth they're actually moving the heat? Seems like "We've made a device that can move destructive heat a very small distance from where it's generated!", which I don't get the point of. Wouldn't this, at best, create a more uniform distribution of the heat? Doesn't say anything about where it goes...
Well, maybe they're using a big peltier on top of the chip and using these little things to move heat over to it. Maybe.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
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 isnt this the case with any cooling?
I hate to point out the obvious, but any form of cooling is heat displacement.. including ur current heatsink / fan combo.. all it does is take the heat and pump it into your case.
However the heat a 1.x Ghz cpu generates is nothing compared to the heat a 10k rpm HD generates. The harddrive has a larger surface, so feels 'cooler' per square inch, but the total amount of energy displaced is a lot bigger. (this is why case fan's are good to use)
so i dont think the comment 'fry everything else in the case' is very relevant, since the microcoolers dont change the question or situation, just the method for re-distributing the heat.
-- Chris Chabot
"I dont suffer from insanity, i enjoy every minute of it!"
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
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.