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Wriggling Heat Sinks
YourHero writes "Purdue researchers have come up with a new way to cool chips, in about 2 years. Just build a bunch of little piezoelectric fans (the waving kind, not the spinning kind). Since they don't spin, no bearings, less self-generated heat. Since they don't have magnets, no electromagnetic noise problems. And, of course, super-efficient. A press release and abstract for your reading pleasure. Formal presentation at THERMES 2002 Jan 15th."
Doesn't anybody think it's cool to be noisy anymore? I mean, say what you will about being distracting and all that, but I'd love to impress my friends with a PC that sounds like a lawnmower. it's POWER! it's TOUGH! it's AMERICAN!
sometimes worrying about things like noise is too girly, even for me.
spacefem.com
However, they're not cheap. Pricing starts at $149. Additionally there is a Piezoelectric Resonant Blade Element. Interesting stuff. Hopefully mass production of piezoelectric fans will lower their price to the average customer range.
What do you think of MusicCity now?
Half seriously, though, you might think of superconducting chips to eliminate the heating due to the resistance in aluminium/copper wires. But AFAIK you can't build logic circuits entirely out of superconductors. The siliconductors (sic :-) we now use, require current to pass
through potential differences (energy gaps in the crystal structure). Power dissipated equals
current times potential difference, period. And there are lower limits for the voltage imposed
by the semiconductor used.
Until we get something entirely different, I'm quite happy to put my geekineering effort into the design of better cooling. I'm sure it can be almost as fun as inventing new kinds of logic chips.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
This is just an excuse for designers to make CPU's less efficent and more power hungry.
ImagineWashington Post: Dec 13, 2018. Details are now emerging about the accident that irradiated much of Germany on Tuesday. Nothing is as yet confirmed, however, initial reports indicate that a heatsink was somehow removed from an AMD processor (PR rating 10,000,000). A bizzare terrorist group with the initials THG may have been involved. Containment was lost, and critical mass was reached almost immediately. AMD representatives have issued a statement in the wake of the carnage: "Obviously, they were using an improperly designed motherboard."
Here's a picture of an old-style piezo fan
You used to be able to buy piezo fans for the old Mac Classic (read the list near the bottom of the page).
IOW, piezo fans have been around since the mid-to-late 80's. Now, yes, I'll admit that they weren't very efficient (as in, they didn't move a lot of air)... but the concept has been there for eons.
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I don't mind the noise, but dissipating heat in general would be a good thing.
The thing they need to do is make chips that run cooler. And yeah, Crusoe's do run cooler but they don't perform optimally in a task-switching environment.
Cooling the CPU is fine, but the heat has to go somewhere and a better solution is to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to reduce the heat output in the first place. PLEASE.
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I don't have a solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
What are the chances of the conventional ball bearing fans, in the very computers that are doing all the mathematical modeling, will go on strike??
Self-preservation is quite a motivator.
I don't know what kind of chips these researchers are using, but the kind I use build up heat a lot faster, and thus need to be cooled constantly, not just every two years.
lame jokes brought to you by:
"when life gets complicated, I like to take a nap in a tree and wait for dinner" - Hobbes.
They're used in inkjet printers - they're in ink some cartridge when an electric field is applied to them and they change shape, forcing the ink out of the I also hear the they used them in the ipod for some sort of playlist control mechanism.
The only way I wont be surprised is if we dont see a repost of this tomorrow
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Ok, I just got this be-yoo-t-ful image in my mind:
Imagine the piezoelectric fan on a larger scale, not just waving a metal+ceramic blade (single flexible surface area), but creating an undulating sheet about the size of a letter/a4 size piece of paper using stripes of piezoelectric flexion areas that create a wave every 2-3cm. Now combine this with the latest in flexible printed circuitry top and bottom (or 2 layers top and bottom, for the really adventurous). I'd imagine you might also need periodic non-flexible stripes (ends?) for components and connects that can't be made flexible. Then add a lower-power processor and put it into an enclosure only slightly larger than the wave height, such as, say, a laptop computer housing. What do you have?
You'd get a motherboard that cools itself by cilia-like swimming/undulation movement that pushes air (against the enclosure) across its surface silently.
You'd get quieter rackmount systems, with 1U or "blade" servers that self-vent. ("Ah, yah need tah balance yer server there, buddy, the blades are outta sync.")
You get a laptop that you might enjoy putting in your lap. (On second thought, I'm not sure I want to sit next to someone on a plane with a two-stroke laptop...)
just my $0.02
-Jon Espenschied
I think not...(*poof*)
I've been looking into this a lot recently, and there's some pretty (ahem) cool developments on the cpu front recently, with x86 architectures.
Some people point to the VIA C3-800, but if you have real computing needs, steer clear. It runs comparable to a Celeron 400, which is almost, but not quite adequate for general computing. Instead, check out the old reliable suppliers. The shift to .13u means a lot. Frequencies are so high and chips are so powerful that underclocking has become a real option. A good general target for fanless operation is about 12 watts. You can go higher with good case airflow, or lower if you're dealing with troublesome ambient temperatures.
Right now, you can take the Intel Tualatin pIII 1.13GHz (28W), cut the bus speed to around 100MHz, cut the voltage down to about 1.1v and be right in the target range. Of course you won't know exactly w/o experimentation on your cpu, but it *should* be doable. If you're worried about losing efficiency to bus speed, remember that you can compensate by running it on one of the PIII DDR chipsets that are now available (upping effective bus speeds to 200MHz) or waiting until February, when Intel says they'll release a similar part themselves. Additionally, the 512k (vs 256k) cache on the pIII-s will offset lower bus speeds. Just check out the specs of the PIII-M LV models at developer.intel.com and ask how they got to those low wattage numbers with the same core. Since the last fanless G4 was 400MHz and claimed (in its wildest fantasies) to be a supercomputer twice as fast as a pIII, a fanless 800MHz pIII is not insignificant.
Even better, surprise, is AMD. The current mobile palomino runs at 1.1GHz, 1.1v, 25w. This is clearly just an underclock of the current 1.75v desktop XPs. But what it tells you is that the AMD architecture is very open to undervoltage at lower clock speeds.
Now if you consider AMD's forthcoming die shrink, things really look good. Zdnet.de reported (unsourced) that the Athlon 1.73GHz processor would drop from about 75W to 45W after the changeover. Depending on how far you could drop the voltage, you could be looking at a 1-1.2GHz part running at about 10W! Fanless! Now imagine (a beo..no) 2 of these in a well ventilated case, with an MPX board -- 2GHz of dead silent AMD power! Wooo!
Alright, I'm calmed down. Back to your original point. It's really a shame about the alternative architectures. Every time I think of venturing into the embedded market, I get brushed off by the 2x price, 1/2x power rule. But since the ARM and PPC don't seem to be generating any economies of scale, at least mainstream processors are progressing fast enough to make cool, cheap and fast a real alternative.
Kill, Tux, kill!