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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.
tends to cook my legs very well now. If it were able to conduct heat any more efficiently I believe it would become too painful to use. On the other hand that kind of thing could lead to a lawsuit that would get me out of the daily grind and into the life of luxury I deserve.
Ceramics are cool - I love ceramic knives but they are so easy to break.
Water cooled laptops would make for 'funny' commercials with guys crawling over sand dunes gasping "water!, water!" and then pouring it into their computers. I could be a marketing genius.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
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.
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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.
I have a Dell C800 (1ghz) laptop. When the fan comes on, people look over...when the second comes on, people dive for cover. (Well, maybe they are not really that loud) It would be nice if they could sync the RPM's a little better so it doesn't have the "whir" "whir" "whir" sound. That's the price I have to pay for a 1st gen gightz laptop.
I've got some copper piping stuff going from my CPU to the fans, which supposedly has some super heat conductive stuff in it.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
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.
1) We're going to finally start seeing hard-drive free systems. RAM is actually cheap enough that one to two gigs, living off an independent power supply, should be price competitive with a ten gig hard drive. Though XP might need to be shaved down a bit to fit in such a small amount of space, the increased system speed and vastly decreased amount of moving parts should make a significant difference in both power consumption and heat generation(the two are arguably the same thing). On the flip side, repeatedly pulsing that much memory might actually drain more power than I'd guess, and battery life on the RAM might not extend past a few days. In this case, I could still see a microdrive + RAM combo, or even a system that flat out just ran off a 2gb microdrive.
2) CPU heat will eventually be turned into a power source. Heh -- it's there, it's dependable, and if nothing else, it'll supplement primary power sources. I don't know how efficient electrical heat->power systems are -- I doubt Peltiers are going to work too well here, and we ain't sticking a turbine into a laptop (though Microfluidics just got much, much more interesting!). So this is the "five-to-ten years down the road" likelihood.
3) I feel like sounding like an idiot for a second, so I'll put this out there just for someone else to discredit: What about mechanical compression? Imagine a spring on the side of a laptop that needed to be pushed in periodically, but would absorb heat by slowly expanding. It'd be annoying, but each time the spring was compressed, heat should be lost reasonably harmlessly to the user's musculature. I'm sure this doesn't work, but I'd be interested in knowing the history of why not.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Hitachi will sell water-pump cooling for notebooks
Imagine you're using a notebook with water cooling in a public place and it somehow starts leaking. You suddenly have hot water running all over you and when you stand up you somehow have to explain how that big wet spot got on your pants in the first place...
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.
- - - - - - - -
Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
What I'm wondering is why no one has attempted to regenerate that heat back into usable energy. Sure, there will be significant losses, but if you end up with a net energy profit, it is probably worth it.
Net energy profit? Young lady, in this house we obey the laws of THERMODYNAMICS!!!
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
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. *
Looking inside my Apple PowerBook G4, I see things that look very much like pipes traveling away from the CPU to other areas of the laptop (areas which tend to get rather warm), and I assume these are the phase-change heat pipes I heard about a few years back. Whether Apple is the only company doing this, I don't know, but it is sure cool, pardon the pun. The fact that the G4 consumes less power is also a big help.
I'm now going to go off on a tangent, mentioning various aspects of physics that are barely relevant, but pretty damn cool. First of all, a bunch of people have suggested using the heat as a power source. While you can use temperature gradients as a power source (think thermocouples), it's damn unlikely to be practical here (the power harnessed would be trivia).
Second, I'd like to point out that heat dissipation is becoming an increasingly-important problem in CPU design. Although we're not there yet, there are theoretical limits on how efficient non-reversible computations can be, in a thermal sense. In other words, each time you manipulate a bit (to be really picky, each time you reset a bit), it must produce a certain amount of heat. This could be the hard limit that breaks Moore's Law for classical, non-reversible computers. The way around this is to use reversible gates (such as in quantum computing), which have no such minimum heat cost. For instance, the XOR gate can be replaced with the controlled-not (CNOT) gate, which is reversible. This would require a major reworking of how we build computers... But I digress... Suffice it to say, heat is a big problem, and it's only going to get worse.
Bill Gates buys Itanium, then can't sit down for a week. He sells Itanium then optimises and removes bloat from Windows.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?