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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
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...
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 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.
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?
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.
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.