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Notebook Cooling Strategies
An Anonymous Coward writes "As components shrink, heat control becomes critical. Hitachi will sell water-pump cooling for notebooks while Sony has fancy, twin-fan ductwork in its new Vaio laptops. Meanwhile, a ceramics company that's testing a coating that's highly efficient in radiating heat away from processors and race car engines." We mentioned the water-cooled notebooks earlier.
I find no matter how quiet they make these cooling systems in both laptops and desktops, water or air-cooled, its the hard drive noise that's drives me nuts. I use SilentPC stuff, including their hard drive cover, but I still find that high pitched whir of the HD is the loudest and most irritating thing coming out of my box.
Now sure I can get my hard drive to spin down when not in use, but even when I'm not sitting at the computer there are many a cron job that need to get done, and when they write to disk the hard drive spins up again. Apparently IBM's drives are supposed to be quiet, but I got one and they are anything but.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
Power consumption on chips will most likely continue to rise into the future. Process technology shinks (025um -> 0.18um, for example) have long been used to lower power, but transistors have now gotten so small that they are essentially conducting even while they are supposed to be turned off. In addition, everyone tries to cram more transistors onto a chip to improve performance which uses more power. Finally, pipelining improves performance by allowing higher frequencies, but faster clocks use more power. The end result is that chips will continue to get hotter into the future. Patrick Gelsinger from Intel gave a keynote at the ISSCC 2001 conference showing graphs in this rise in power and said that power will be one of the biggest challenges faces designers going forward.
In mobile apps, the majority of consumers pay little attention to battery life beyond looking for a minimum theshold (an hour and a half). In addition, since there is no defined way to test for power that is enforced between manufacturers, there is no easy way to compare battery life using the manufacturer's specifications. Performance sells CPUs in the mobile space - not power savings. At least not yet.
As long as performance continues to be the key selling point of CPU's, the power situation isn't likely to get better - and, at best, can only hope to stand constant. Performance and power savings are generally opposed in CPU designs similar to the way fuel economy and high-performance engines generally are opposites. Even if power becomes the key selling point, the future still doesn't look bright for power dissipation on chips. Current leakage in supposedly "off" transistors will continue to rise in future process technologies.
* Not speaking for Intel Corp. *