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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
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.
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!
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.
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.
.... 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're going to get this elaborate, why not just build fancy liquid chip cooling systems that overclockers use all the time into the cases? You could have a whole rack of servers running off of one coolant box. Your datacenter would go from rack after rack of servers to 1 rack of servers, 1 rackspace taken by the cooler, etc. It'd be cheaper in the long run also, judging by HP's pricing scheme for their existing consumables like inkjet ink cartridges.
Oh and there's already a graffitti bot. He's over here!
Or you could just buy a pack of dobermans to guard your server farm and place fire hydrant stickers on your cpu's.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Shit my html skillz are failing today.
Grafitti robot is here http://www.appliedautonomy.com/gw.html
Might be easier to build a room sized refridgeration unit and move the racks in there. Even mom and pop grocery stores have them so they can't cost that much. Condenser maintenance is probably less expensive than maintaining a robot.
if you filled the robot with hot grits, would it automagically find Natalie Portman and spray her down with them?
Guess What? The robot and the ink jet based cooling system are two different things. The robot adjusts the air conditioning in the room, the ink jet based coolant determines the specific parts of the chip that need cooling.
One is on the Macro scale (sorts) and the other is on the micro scale.
The robot will NOT be spraying ANYTHING!
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Now-a-days CMV (chemical vapor deposition) of carbon is so advanced that you can get milimeters worth of diamond within hours.
diamond have probabbly the best thermal conductivity known to man, so if you CMV a diamond layer on the chip and use that for interfacing to a copper heatsink, i would think that it would be a better idea than putting small sprayers.
liquid will vaporize and get recollected -- but it also have the problem of
1) depositing crap when it's vaporizing
2) possible diminishment of the resevior throughout the system's lifetime. i would hate to have to replace anything like this -- since they recommend direct access to the die's surface!
any impurities in the liquid can spell certain death.
Lastly, i do not foresee this being much cheaper that artificial diamond heat-interface. especially if this is done on a large scale -- it would have the side-benefit of really cheap diamonds for everything from lenses (scratch free! never breaks! ultra-light!) to screwdriver tips, etc etc.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Does it take its face and hands off before it goes to bed? What kind of powers does it have? And does it use them for good, or for awesome?
Strong Bad wants to know!
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
Clearly, you didn't read the article.
The robot doesn't spray anything. The ink jet based coolant is in the case against the chip.
The robot is running around finding hot spots so the AC can be adjusted.
They were only mentioned in the same article because they both revolve around HP's Datacenter Cooling technology.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
> "We believe we have to take a holistic approach to cooling," said Chandrakant Patel,
:)
On first thought, throwing mist over microprocessors, seems more like an alcoholistic idea. Anyone been to a sauna? Does not this create a new problem of increased humidity -and even worse -fluctuating temperature and relative humidity and problems resulting from that...oh, but HP makes the hardware, now they can sell double the stuff in same time, good plan
Broken robot => broken chips
668: Neighbour of the Beast
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.
sounds like a bad .NET commercial....rather in the vein of the Asian mother who keeps telling her daughter to go to bed while the daughter is tagging vehicles on an assembly line oversees with her name (forget whose commercial it was, but it illustrates the point). Nothing like one degree of separation between the black hats and your business...
What is your Slash Rating?
You will see a lot of bimbos and bosses walking around all soaked.
Table-ized A.I.
We NEVER expect the SpanishInquisition...
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
What? These robots are going to be carrying Palm Pilots around?
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
can be achieved by painting the chips red (like fire hydrents) and letting your dog loose.
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/CPU+design
/. over the past 2 years regarding the technology, but I've yet to see anything I could ID as a device using the tech ni the consumer market.
clockless cpu's. We're about to hit a wall anyways somewhere above 2.3 Ghz in which more of the CPU cycles will be spent tracking cpu cyles than actually getting work done. I'd say a basic design change is due. I've read several articles on
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
But the Street Writer and Grafitti writer are very cool uses of automation. It kinda reminds me of those silly clocks with the swinging arm and 8 or so LEDS that turn on just when you need to. Of course...it also reminds of the Dot Matrix printers. Very cool reading...thanks.
HP Marries Inkjet and Robotic Technology
The first image that came to mind when I read that title was of a small robot, maybe the size of the martian land rover that roamed around painting large canvas's.
It's underside would have a inkjet cartridge, battery powered, and completely remote via infa red or 802.11.
You suck for not making something like this HP. I know everyone want's one.
Kick off a keg party and set the robot on AutoFill!!
Man... Now all we need is to give it a nice rack and a tight tank top :-)
T
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
T
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
All robots eventually become self aware and turn on their human masters!
The middle mind speaks!
I mean, it's great and all. A robot to cool chips. Yay. More power to em I guess, but come on... This couldn't be done by more conventional means, not to mention cheaper? Okaaay...
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