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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.
One could always inspire computer makers to simply develop more heat-efficient chips...
:)
This has the added benefit of increasing battery life, as in most cases heat emission is proportional to power draw (all that energy has to go somewhere, and it usually comes out as heat).
Motorola has done a pretty good job, probably b/c their main market is for embedded systems. This has the result that Apple laptops are remarkably power efficient and give off little heat. My iBook's fan has *never* turned on since I bought it about a year ago. It has gotten warm, but the fan hasn't ever needed to turn on. tiBooks have G4 chips, which are less "cool" while running, so PowerBook G4 fans turn on more often. And I imagine the transmeta Crusoe is similiar, though i've never used a Crusoe laptop
But still, one would imagine it would be cheaper to develop more energy-efficient chips, rather than simply finding ways to vent that energy. Of course, If venting must be done, I am all for fractal-geometry heatsinks at the nano-level (maximizes surface area in which heat venting can occur, for a lot less price than water cooling, not to mention being very nice and quiet), but thats a topic for another post
Anyways, my point is that it might be better to develop a solution at the chip level, rather than have to compensate for power-guzzling chips by having obnoxiously loud and edxpensive cooling solutions.
The fact that the portable device is generating that much heat means you're loosing a lot of your precious battery to resistance, not a very good use of your battery life.
they should be mainly concerning themselves with lessening energy consumption and keeping the same performance if they really want to make something worthwhile. unless of course someone wants to come out with a dual processor notbook, batter life would then infact be a moot point.
There's this article I found... some people have developed ways to cool silicon using nothing but silicon! Here's the article. I remember also a little side article about refrigerating silicon (the silicon acts as a active heat dissipater) in Popular Science a few issues back but I'm too lazy to dig through my room or do a web search.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
--Chag
It just seems to me that water cooling is so. . .clunky. It takes a lot of energy to circulate water which has to come from somewhere. Water is HEAVY. And there's always the obvious problem of water around sensitive electronics, as anyone who's "water-cooled" a gameboy in the bathtub will tell you.
One of my roomies has a water-cooled case, and the sucker is heavy, expensive, takes a lot of water, and sucks a ton of power. Keeps his athlon cool without a huge roaring fan, but if the thing ever tips over I would think he's out a lot of money. Not to mention the huge stain on the carpet.
Water cooling can't be the answer for laptops; too inefficient, too heavy, and its a dated idea. I would think that chips that ran cooler would be a more long-term solution.
Sides, if your laptop sprung a leak, I think a wet lap on a plane for 8 hours would be damn unpleasant.
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Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
The leaking issue and conductivity of water has already been solved by 3M with their flourinert product. Conducts heat great, toss a running electrical device into a pool of it and it won't create a single short. My memory is a little fuzzy here, but it's not all that expensive (well much more expensive then water, but a lot less expensive then say printer ink cartridges). The only problem I see with water cooled laptops is the radiator/pump and keeping the system efficient without making it huge. It took me an enormous AT tower to make a self-contained water cooled desktop.
One problem with the new faster-than-God chips is that the clock signal has to switch every clock cycle (duh). Most waste heat comes from the switching from 1 to 0 or vice versa, so that shiny new 1.7 GHz P4 laptop is going to be making that clock signal heat 3 times faster than the 600 MHz machine you're using now. If CPU makers went for more aggressive parallelism (AMD for x86, IA-64 long term, etc) the clock wouldn't need to switch nearly as fast, saving us a lot of wasted energy. Of course, Joe Consumer is still only looking at the clock speed when buying a new laptop, so manufacturers are stuck to following the market and driving battery life into the ground