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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
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."
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.
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*)