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New Semiconductor Coolers
An anonymous reader writes: "A new thermoelectric material is 2.4X as efficient as
best existing materials. The new solid state heat pumps
can provide 700 watts of cooling (nearly one horsepower)
with just one square centimeter. These new materials have the
potential to replace current heat sinks, thermoelectric
generators and mechanical heat pumps.
You can also read an article in nature."
There was a brief bit on NPR about this a few days ago. NPR recording
a couple of them in fact. (look to the bottom of the page)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The problem with these heat pumps (and Peltier coolers) is that the cooler sucks heat away from the processor side and pushes it to the exposed side of the cooler. As an unfortunate side effect, the cooler GENERATES additional heat in the process.
As an example, if your processor generates 50 watts of heat output, the cooler might generate an additional 50. The processor itself would stay cool, but you're dumping a lot of extra heat into your case, requiring even more case ventilation.
Not very practical for most users.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
I agree with your conclusions.
This seems like a great way to quickly remove heat from a small area and spread it to a large area. You'll still have a lot of waste heat on the hot side of this and I'm sure you'll need a heatsink on there. Large than before in fact because this appears to be a powered thermocouple like a Peltier cooler which means it should generate waste heat as well.
The benefit though is that heatsinks become more efficient as the temperature gradient goes up, so we should still be able to get the heat into the air and then out of the case. And because this thermocouple maintains a rather large gradient we should be able to keep the CPU that much cooler.
As for the little dots of it, etc... I think what they mean is that inside the CPU core you'd have little dots of this being used to pump heat away from the main heat generating areas directly into the heat-spreader on top of the chip. The only other way to do it is let the heat diffuse through the whole core and then into the heat spreader.
So this would be a lot better at putting heat in manageable areas (the heatsink) but it isn't magic, you couldn't put a bit in a sealed package and have heat magically disappear.