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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.
I recently went on a tour of the HP research labs here in Palo Alto, CA, and I made a comment to the lady conducting the tour concerning this. In a nutshell, it was the following.
This technology would require liquid cartridges to run the cooling mechanism, which would mean that every computer would require us to buy these from HP, much like printer cartridges. The lady had a rude comment about how HP was really in the business about selling consumables (like printer cartridges and soon CPU cooler cartridges) and that this was somehow a wonderful idea.
Taking advantage of a liquid-gas phase transition to cool is a great idea, but to require a proprietary chemical to do it is lame. I'm sure there are ways to do this with water, right?
Makes you wonder whether this would be better than the cheap plastic cooling fans that break down and have to be replaced all the time now.
Well, not only graffiti taggin' super robots, but also graffiti taggin' super cargo van (think "A-Team") and graffiti taggin' super remote controlled cars can be found at Applied Autonomy. Very cool.