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Hitachi Demos Water-Cooled Notebooks
Sprocket writes: "Water-cooled processors, currently the domain of supercomputers, high-end servers, and garage hobbyists, may be about to enter the mainstream.
Hitachi has developed a prototype notebook PC that uses a water-based solution to cool down its Pentium 4 processor and is planning to commercialize the product for corporate users in the third quarter of this year... read more"
Well, you can scratch Antarctica and Siberia as places you can't use this notebook, if the liquid coolant freezes in very low external temperatures.
Water-cooled? That's boring.
Now what I want is an Ice-Cream-Cooled Laptop. Like an electronic Klondike bar. Mmmm...
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Kind of like Honda shipping riced up Civics by default, it's pretty funny that the industry is following the overclockers. To take a look at the roots of water cooling, check out the definitive hobbyist on the subject, complete with alternate designs, plans, technical faq - the works.
Personally, I'll buy it when it's packaged and done for me, and not until then.
Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
According to the specs, the unit will produce 0.3 oz of 140 degree-F. water per minute. Therefore, it should only take 15 minutes to brew one Standard 5 Oz. Cup of coffee. Now, if they can only get the CD-ROM drive to double as a cupholder....
You can already buy water cooling kits for your PC. (This company is accepting backorders.)
Like a liquid that doesn't conduct electricity, isn't caustic, and isn't extremely sticky when dried? It would seem to me that would make for easier repairs in the future and make for a safer investment in an unproven application of cooling technology.
People expect reliability out of their performance laptops, afterall.
What and make my processor overheat? No way!
The original Japanese Dreamcast was. The American Dreamcast just had a fan. It still negates the point of this article though. Water cooling for consumer electronics has already happened and is, in fact, Old News.
I think the Dreamcast had a heatpipe. Lots of laptops have heat pipes (basically a tube under certain pressure and a bit of an angle with a few drops of water in it, in normal state it is liquid, that under heat cause the water to turn to vapor, migrate away from the heat source, evaporate and drip back down the tube into vapor again.) Not new at all, and very passive... Not actively pumped about like this is....
Lousy facepalm.
Water has a much higher calorific capacity than air. I believe it's around 4.19J/g*Celsius which is very high.
It is the logical choice for cooling, being less noisy, parts have to move slower, etc etc... But why does the article say this is for garage hobbyists? Water cooling has been around for a while and at least 5 relatively large cies offer it. Tomshardware and Anandtech have had quite a few reviews of the different brands.
Another plus is you can plug everything on the same circuit, Northbridge, CPU, GPU, hell, even the power supply. All you have to do is increase the pipe size by a relatively small factor.
The temperature is maintained around ambient too, so the cooling is MUCH more efficient than air.
The next step is nanocooling. There was an article in Nature a way back about nanofans (more like oscillating piezoelectric thingys), that dissipate heat at an astounding rate (although I don't recall how exactly since they throw it at the air which doesn't have such a good calorific capacity...). Anyways, the point is that this isn't really revolutionary because it has been used in home computers (by more than garage hobbyists) for at least 3 years. And before that there was Kryotech...
Imperium et libertas
Autocracy and freedom
"Man it sure was alot less lonely when we had those fans going."
Record your current fan noise, so you can play it back on the internal speaker of your future computer if it's too quiet.
Negative.
Here's a picture of a first generation DC's guts:
http://www.mindspring.com/~refridgerator/dc5.jp
Note the heatsink and fan combo on the top-left of the image.
Victor
Dell has cooled its laptops via water for at least a year now. Take apart any Latitude or Inspiron over 800MHZ and look at the small copper pipes that sit in front of the cooling fan. Those pipes circulate water over the CPU, helping to cool it.
No, really, I didn't wet my pants!! My laptop leaked!
qslack.com
An Athlon 4 with water-cooling would just produce steam.
Love,
Jay and Silent Bob
Water cooled laptops are nothing new at all. Check out these water cooling laptop articles, produced from a quick google search:
Toshiba
IBM
I know there are others, but I can't seem to find them at the moment. It's certainly my underestanding that there have been water cooled laptops in production for quite a while.
Isn't this really just more evidence that a P4 is inappropriate for laptops? Intel is making a good attempt at targeting a specific market (P4 is "primarily" a server chip), but their insistence on cramming every processor into a small box just for shits and giggles is silly.
We could use the natural thermal properties of a closed system to circulate the water, by having it rise to exchangers in the screen-backing area...
We could then start adding turbines to reclaim some of the energy lost as heat from the unit, and use that to help prolong the time between charges on the unit! Just think! The more hard number crunching you do, the hotter the processor gets, and the longer your laptop runs! It'd be a reason for EVERYONE to run seti@home!
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Wow. Talk about Vaporware...yikes...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I could have sworn that when the first 1GHz laptops came out a few months ago, They took one apart on TechTV to show the water cooling and all.
SIGFEH
honestly, isnt a P4 in a notebook a complete and total waste? The main performance bottleneck in a notebook anymore is the harddrive, not the CPU. The whole idea of a laptop is to be able take it to various places and be able to run it for a few hours on the battery. With the kind of power the P4 sucks down, you can kiss that goodbye. Add in fans to cool down the processor and/or water, and more of your battery goes bye bye. You'd need DDR to get the most out of the P4 as well, sdram + P4 is horribly slow and Rambus generates huge amounts of heat, which we all know is a no no in a notebook. I'm sorry Intel, but not everyone wants or needs a Marketing Processor (which is what the P4 really is, marketing over engineering) in a notebook. Give me a cool running low power Mobile P3 any day of the week.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Walking off a long flight.
No, honestly, my laptop just leaked...
Maybe I'm being silly, but is this really neccessary? I'm sure it will sell. I work in Government, particularly law enforcement, and the purchasing decisions are made totally backwards. Recently, all of the agents (cops) in our department got new laptops. It was considered important that they be able to transport these things so that they can be more flexible or dynamic or something... Anyway, the guy in charge of ordering bought the Dell "desktop replacement" laptop, which weighs about 8 pounds! The result? We have a bunch of overpriced desktops with LCD displays and laptop keyboards. The agents never take them ANYWHERE.
To get back on topic, I can see how this is going to be a "It's more expensive, so it must be better," or, a, "Finally, I can get the computing power that I need in a laptop!" I've had a Pentium III 850 for almost a year now and I just can't see how that isn't going to be sufficient processing power to drive my applications for a long time. Up until a few weeks ago I was using a PII 300 at work, and it was great with Windows 2000 and office XP.
The gist of my comment: In 90% (or more) of the instances customers who buy these machines will not need the processing power that is provided by the advanced cooling. My problem is when it's public sector buyers that are misinformed and willing to spend public dollars on gimmicky stuff.
Wait, never mind, maybe you do need that Pentium 4 to do email...sorry!
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
So there! (Yes, I'm aware the URL is weird, but it works)
Personally, I'd have engineered the water tank to the bottom of the unit or as another drive bay. Gravity would force the water from a broken unit outside the laptop.
Not sure about Pizza on P4, but try an egg on AthlonXP :-)
The change in pressure won't effect the volume of the coolant (assuming it is water.) Only a gas coolant would be effected. This does however effect the boots used by the Canadian military. Their winder boots have a pocket of air to help insulate them. They have a little air valve on their side that needs to be opened so that the boots don't explode during air transport.
By the way, if anyone ever needs some very warm, durable boots - check out an army surplus store. The only commercial boots that even come close are in the $300 range and aren't as durable. The military has some damn nice equipment...
Watercooling requires a way to move that water, ie, a pump. Moving parts that require power, and the problem is that you still have to get x watts of heat out of the water at the other end. I think the current use of a heat pipe is much better than watercooling. The only "movement" is the phase change powered by the heat itself, and so there is less chance of failure.
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Of all the responses here, yours is the most correct. The first generation of Japanese-manufactured Dreamcast (made for the Japanese and U.S. markets) was cooled by a heat pipe and slow (quiet) metal fan. These models were considerably heavier than the later/non-Japanese-made models because of the weight of the heat pipe and fan. They also had more heat problems than later models, because they originally used an older, hotter-running rev of the Hitachi SH4.
To complement the cooler SH4s, later models used light heat sinks and faster-spinning (louder) plastic fans. The drives were also different, causing minor differences in noise, compatibility, and reliability (none of which contributed to any cooling issues).
In any case, you are right in that the "water cooling" done by the heatpipe was much more passive than Hitachi's method. It was so passive (and largely ineffective) that it was designed to augment the cooling effects of the fan, not replace the fan entirely.
< tofuhead >
It is still the dark of night.
With current tech, we could create a 486 based word processing machine, thinner, cheaper, lighter, and with a week's worth of power, rather than just a few hours.
Why they insist on forcing desktop replacements on the market is beyond me. (Actually, it isn't beyond me, it's all about keeping those profit margins high.)
As a writer, dealing with these noisy, overheating, overpriced, heavy machines is distasteful. As a programmer, I'm gonna use my laptop as a terminal, not a server, so all those extra CPU cycles are wasted.
Methanol? Nah... You want Ethanol-powered fuelcells. "I'll have a Scotch and Water for me and a Vodka and Water for my laptop here"...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
By the way, the revolutionary part about this laptop is that it uses a mechanical pump to move the hot coolant to the radiation panel at the back of the LCD, whereas traditional cooling mechanisms uses the palmrest and/or the bottom of the laptop to dissipate heat in addition to the air fan. The idea is that
Also, before people start screaming about how big the water tanks are in the photos, the article says that the tanks were deliberately enlarged to emphasize the point of these prototypes, and they will be reduced in production models.
Give me a Pentium-I 300Mhz with sixteen hours battery life any day of the week...
(I figure if they can make a P4 run four hours, the P1 should be good for at least four times longer!)
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
I can't see any downsides. More computrons, faster brewing. Everyone's happy.
I think you need *cool* water. IIRC, the water out of a fuel cell is hot (sometimes steam). Why can't the water be in a closed loop from the CPU to a radiator on the case. IMHO, we need cooler, more efficent processors not complex cooling systems.
Have you considered a 14" 600MHz 6lb iBook for your needs?
Word, Office, bash, sips at the battery, and comes with a fairly hefty 55W battery too. It runs, what, at a rated 6hours on a single battery? I suspect it runs lower, of course, but still, 4.5 hours isn't horrible.
GPL Deconstructed
No, you'll just mknod -p and use some |-fu.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Heat pipes are an old idea - they were used in the Apollo program. IBM's key addition to the technology is developing a hinge that efficiently transfers heat between the laptop's body (the heat source) and the display (the heat radiator). There isn't much info in the article referenced in the original post to figure out just what Hitachi thinks is original.
So... they don't make any extra profit (probably less for an identical retail price), there's no extended battery life (so how is this "more efficient"?), and the only benefit is that it (apparently) lives longer than an air cooled system, a fairly intangible benefit even for a corporate purchaser, given that by the time the air cooling system is likekly to give out, the laptop will have moved so far down the corporate food chain that it will probably have long since been "recycled" by a sticky fingered employee.
Some problems with this.
Technology for technology's sake? This is a demo unit, and is smells to me like some R&D czar trying to garner some media interest in a dying project. It's nice technology, but it seems largely pointless.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Two obvious ones:
1) And you thought MEMORY leaks killed programs...
and
2) Going into that super important customer meeting after the water coolant just let go leaving a huge wet spot on the front of your pants: "No, really, it was my laptop!"
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Is there such a thing as a corporate user? Do corporations still buy anything when the economy is being driven by consumers?
You're claiming that overclockers invented water-cooled computers? What about, for example, the Cray 1? And there's almost certainly earlier examples. This is really old industry tech, not some crazy idea the hotrodder kids dreamed up.
Gez every 2nd laptop currently being made has a heatpipe - its no big deal
"Heatpipes" are nothing new.
Although heatpipes are mainly utilised where things are cramped arround the heatsource, to move the heat to another spot where there's more room for a heatsink (hence its popularity in laptops, where they move the heat from the CPU to behind the screen, where there's room for a wide albit flat heatsink), there are a couple of Socket 7/370/A heatsinks that utilise the heatpipe effect. The "Zen Radiator", which uses the heatpipe as the core of a radiator like arrangement; & the "Coolermaster HHC-001 Heatpipe Copper Cooler", which has long (as in high) fins & uses heatpipes to help conduct heat to the top of the fins.
All this article shows is that PC World employs a laptop reviewer who doesn't know what he's talking about in regards to laptops.
Really if a tech mag is going to have someone write a blurb about laptop cooling they should employ someone who actually knows something about laptop cooling.
And I thought it was bad when the water pump died on my car!
- The auditors said to secure the server... hand me that duct-tape -
Water cooled notebooks.
I recently heard a presentation which indicated just how difficult the situation is getting with respect to power density. IIRC, in terms of W/cm, todays chips are surpassing the output of hotplates, moving towards the realm of nuclear reactors.
I'd heard the switch from bi-polar to CMOS in the 1990s helped to avert a similar imminent meltdown.
At these extremes, there have to be some research efforts into finding some way out of this mess.
But maybe there's little need for laptop computers to have a faster CPU. What are you going to do with it, type your email faster? Once you can show videos in Powerpoint, why is there any more need for speed in these things?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
If only notebooks would allow you to easily underclock, then you run at lower power and not bake your lap or boil water.