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HP Marries Inkjet and Robotic Technology to Cool Chips
An anonymous reader writes "Extremetech has an article about how H P has decided to use the spraying tech developed for inkjet printers to cool chips -- and has made a robot that'll wander around data centers, detecting too-hot chips and hosing them down." The article notes that the robot needed about 1 hour of training on the room before it would go about the business of chip cooling. The real advance would be if it achieved sentience and went crazy and became a graffiti taggin' super robot, but I digress.
But the memory chips for it will be insanly outpriced.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
"Thermosyphons funnel fluid from the outside condenser to the evaporator on top of the microprocessor. But HP discarded thermosyphons, and heat pipes, because of "pulse boiling", a rapid cycle of heating and cooling that can damage the microprocessor, according to an internal study conducted in May of 2000. HP developed its evaporative cooling to eliminate pulse boiling, Patel said."
Since when does ExtremeTech use a story generator?
spray down really hot people? That sounds scary. Yeah. Besides... the slashdot audience has nothing to worry about... he'll be starting with marathons - places where obviously you wouldn't find your typical slashdot reader.
Inconceivable!
Robot - $1,500.00
Coolant Cartridges - $300.00 each
"A revolution without dancing is... a revolution not worth having"
Only kidding.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
The real advance would be if it achieved sentience and went crazy and became a graffiti taggin' super robot
How about letting it wander around town looking for wireless hookups, and then marking where they are, warchalking style.
Of course, I just had a vision of this thing dressed up like a dog, going around and "marking" it's territory...
.. that the robot plays the Nelly song "It's gettin hot in here, go on and take off all your clothes" as he's going around cooling down processors.
Live web cams
This reminds me of the Red Dwarf series, but more precisely the books. Where Kryton the maintainence mechanoid was responsible for crashing the ship he was on because he ran out of things to clean, so he decided to give the (dusty and dirty) live computer circuit boards a good going over with soapy water and a sponge.
Let's hope they don't have any disasters.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
I tried this myself just a few minutes ago. Since I don't have a robot or injet spraying thing, I just used a water hose and set it on mist. I dont think it worked to well. Sure my computers nice and cool, but it won't boot. How could this be caused by the cooling system?
Well the obvious use for this now is to put this tech into Sony's Aibo.
Now you got a smart dog wandering around sniffing for heat, and pissing... er I mean spraying on it to put it out.
.... if I can eventually use this to cool my systems... how do I heat my house?
Stop intruders... HP has trained a robot to run around spraying people in the eyes with inkjet cartidges, who are not wearing their access badges.
So...are there cooling robots that chase the cooling robots to cool them down when they get too hot? And if so...are there more cooling robots to cool them down? Could be interesting :)
if you filled the robot with hot grits, would it automagically find Natalie Portman and spray her down with them?
I just heard a report of a strange bug in the new robot: for some reason if it detects a non-HP ink cartridge in the printer, it pulls it out and stomps on it. A patch for this problem is expected in Q3 2009.