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Tiny Bubbles Key to Cooling Crazy Hot CPUs

Posted by Hemos on from the wick-the-heat-away dept.

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."

4 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. Cavitation? by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It will be interesting to see if the shock waves from the cavitation (the sudden formation of the tiny bubbles) affects the operation of the chip or erodes the surface, limiting the life.

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    1. Re:Cavitation? by iggymanz · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The sound waves from hard disks and power supply fans surely already make more vibration on the CPU than this would

    2. Re:Cavitation? by Guignol · · Score: 5, Interesting

      What your parent talks about is cavitation, the vibration you talk about is also a problem, but it has nothing to do with cavitation.
      What your parent reffered to was the formation of very tiny bubbles that quickly collapse and release microjets which are very damaging to surrounding surfaces.
      Those tiny bubles also have the (generaly) unwanted property of always orienting themselves so as to send the microjet against the surface of contact, thus making the problem more severe and less unlikely to happen that it might sound in a first thought.
      Those nasty microjets can do a lot of damage and are the reason why stainless steel helices of boats still get corroded.
      In the case of the proposed cooling system, the surface of the channels might be attacked by the released microjets until perforation, since it is so thin.

  2. This brings me to my favorite rant... by mykepredko · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Where does the heat go?

    This seems like a nice technology to remove the heat from the CPU, but what I'm always wondering about is, where will the heat actually be dissipated into the environment? At some point, there has to be a heat exchanger where all this heat collected in the tiny bubbles is passed outside the unit. This is going to take a fair amount of space - one of these days we're going to see ads for heat exchangers that take up less space than the "standard" box available from Intel.

    I'm looking forward to a Beowolf cluster not only performing amazing calculations but also heating the building it's in.

    myke

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