Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Notebook Cooling Strategies

Posted by michael on from the lap-burns dept.

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.

3 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. There's another solution... by Qwerpafw · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. Cool Silicon! by Devil's+BSD · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  3. Net energy profit? by IntelliTubbie · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.