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Tiny Bubbles Key to Cooling Crazy Hot CPUs
Smaz writes "With future CPUs expected to generate as much as four times the heat of today's processors, wicking away that heat remains one of the biggest engineering hurdles in the biz. Researchers at Purdue have developed a pumpless liquid-cooling system that removes nearly six times more heat than existing systems. The trick, it seems, is in the tiny bubbles. From the Science Blog."
The Energy Department. In other words, your tax money at work doing something far more useful than blowing the shit out of Iraq. The big bad Federal Government.
and yes, I am an coward, faceless even.
The heat a CPU generates is roughly proportional to how much power it consumes. Power costs money. With the computer power consumption fast increasing, and electricity costs going much the same way, at least in Gray California, I suspect this has to start becoming a major buying decicion factor.
Does anybody have any numbers on current and future power consumption, and what it would cost per year with current or future electricity prices to keep a computer turned on 24/7?
The heat will be dissipated into the environment the same way it always has, fans will cool the liquid causing it to condense. Other fans will blow the resulting hot air out into the environment just like they always have and then it's up to your ventilation system and air conditioning to keep the place from turning into an oven.
Sure you could link up your ventilation system to your PC, but that's just overkill.
As if 80 watts isn't already enough !! For the vast majority of CPU consumers, 1GHz is more than enough. I wish the CPU manufacturers would focus more on power consumption (which generates heat) and less on raw speed. They are starting to do that, but I would like to see them focus even more on that. I am not looking forward to the day when my computer consumes half the elecricity in my house !
Biodiesel : domestic, renewable, clean, and in the fuel tank of my bone stock 2002 New Beetle TDI
At the moment the pentium 4 at 3.06 is the most power hungry pc processor at 82 watt. So future processors will consumate 320 watts? Imagine an office with 10 of those computers. I think it is time for processors with a better ratio of processing power / electric power. And more efficient optimized software that doesn't waste so much clock cycles.
The problem with all these cooling solutions is that unless the final output for the heat is "outside", it's doing nothing but making MY ROOM hotter and hotter. Put an Athlon and a 21" CRT in a room and close the door. It seriously sucks. Having to sit in a sauna to send an email is really ignorant. I dont know what the answer is, but generating 4 times more heat isn't it. I think PC's need the equivalent of a dryer vent you can hook up to suck the hot air outside.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
With the way things are going, maybe it won't be overkill.
The PC cooling problem has become so ridiculous that some are resorting to using liquid cooling systems to alleviate some of the annoying fan noise modern PCs have. Others are underclocking their processors so they don't need as much fan cooling.
Chip manufacturers have made great strides in reducing the feature size on chips (down to 130 nm now, with 90nm coming soon), and reducing the operating voltage. Both of these measures greatly increase the efficiency of a chip, reducing the amount of waste heat it generates. But instead of making chips that use these advantages to run cool and quiet, they crank up the clockspeed as much as they can without any regard for power consumption and heat generation. And for what? So you can get more fps in some game?
The problem with chip manufacturers is that they haven't noticed yet that most people are happy with their old P2s and P3s, and a 3 GHz P4 isn't going to help them do word processing faster or make their 56k modem go faster. I have a hard time maxing out my little 1 GHz AMD Duron. And now when people do buy new computers, they're taking notice of the new noise their older computers didn't have.
These high-performance processors the article is predicting, and these new cooling systems, are great however for servers and renderfarms. What chip manufacturers need to recognize is that most home and corporate users (except for those stupid "gamers" that care more about fps than gameplay, and constitute a tiny though vocal fraction of the market) have very different needs than datacenters, renderfarms, supercomputer clusters, etc. and tailor their product offerings accordingly.
Four times the heat of today's proc's??? Let's see 84 watts (P4 3.06GHz) X 4 == 336 watts?!? No friggin way, there is no way anyone is going to pay for the costs of running a machine like this... this doesn't even take into consideration the rest of the system!
This is the kind of thing that just outrages me, I think what should be perfected are efforts like the VIA CPU's or the Crusoe (ugh). This brute force mentality in CPU's and Video cards is getting ridiculous. Things need to change in a big way, and I hope that they start soon because I'm not buying or running a 1500 watt powersupply 24/7. I don't care how many FPS it can push in Quake III, hell California alone would be under blackout conditions forever if we start seeing CPU's like this.
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