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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."
I thought that with a properly pressurized closed system that convection and boiling would keep things cool enough. I know this isn't the first silent system, I'm just curious what special benefit the "tiny bubbles" and microchannels provide... unless we are going to another proprietary IBM standard bus.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
This is also why beer is good.
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... that the music of Don Ho would ever yield any practical engineering application.
"If you're thinking what I'm thinking, you're right." -
...will be using the descending liquid flow to turn a generator to provide additional electricity.
imagining a Lava Lamp mounted to your CPU?
The researchers found that the system was 5.7 times better at removing heat than existing miniature pumpless liquid-cooling systems.
It's misleading to generalize "existing miniature pumpless liquid-cooling systems" to "existing systems", as was done in the discussion header. At least, it made me think article was about a cooling solution six times better than *ALL* existing cooling systems. Of course, this leads one to question how good "existing miniature pumpless liquid-cooling systems" are...
you will hard boil an egg rather then fry it on your P12 256bit quad CPU.
darn, all have to get a new recipe book.
Tiny Bubbles
Running WINE
Make me happy
Make my PC feel fine.
Tiny Bubbles
Make me warm no longer
With a feeling that I'm going to cool you
Till the end of time
So here's to the Boilermakers
And here's to Purdue
But mostly here's to a cooler CPU
Tiny Bubbles
Running WINE
Make me happy
Make my PC feel fine.
Happiness is like peeing yourself. Everybody can see it but only you can feel its warmth.
Bubbles? Bubbles of nothing?
DJCC
They mention bubbles in this article - well, it's common knowledge that bubbles in Guinness defy gravity !
So maybe these chips will be served with a Guinness cooling agent ?
A 500 year old cooling method can't be wrong !
I love my chips with Guinness !
Hic, arrrr
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
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
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Yes but will they keep you from burning your unit ?
No, they'll help it happen faster... No slow heat up of the bottom of the laptop - This heat pump is up to 6 times as efficient as the heat pipe. It'll just get the heat away from the cpu faster, no help in keeping it away from your unit.
To recap - No nude laptopping. It is not allowed.
Just because I doubt myself does not mean I find your position compelling.
Now we know why Intel was so anxious to get their anti-overclocking technology working.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
VAPORware!
yeah, had to say it and couldnt find it said with 1 sec search.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Try this special secret Flash advertisement blocking technique:
# rm /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
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Remeber, it is a secret. So please don't tell anyone.
Here's a good analysis on the current state of CPU heat, for those of us who need to be brought up-to-date on the subject to understand the benefits of the new technology...
Why do I h8 apple?
Money I owe, money-iy-ay
It's the same principle used in cooling nuclear reactors - deals with the Laminar Flow layer in fluids. Pretty simple actually. The surface area of the bubbles (must be small or they begin to restrict the flow) is much larger than the surface area of the overall fluid. Sounds weird, but it's true.
I looked away as I glanced at the first line and read it as "With future CPUs expected to generate as much as four times the heat of the sun..."
:)
I was going to agree... my t-bird 1.3ghz gets daamn hot.
There one of the cheapest filter methods out there. The bubbles drive the flow through an uptake tube of an already established siphon between the tank and the filter resivoir.
The hardware layout would need to be orientation independant for a laptop though.
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 chip needs to be at the boiling point of the liquid, maybe not a problem (freon anyone?).
-What happens when the CPU isn't pointing up? (e.g. on a motherboard in a standard case) Will it overheat because the bubbles don't "rise"?
my associative arrays can kick your hash - TCL
So the heat from the CPU creates bubbles in the liquid... Certainly sounds like a Boilermaker to me!
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Since this relies on gas rising while a pool of dielectric fluid boils, I assume there's some air left in the system, right? So, what about when you have your laptop on an agle, and could this work with a traditional tower? It seems that for whatever application you use it in, the cooling unit would always need to be oriented "up".
For those who don't bother to read the article, here's a picture of the thing.
have you been defaced today?
You forgot the addition of plugin.display_plugin_downloader_dialog and setting it to false under about:config
Shouldn't there be some ideas to utilize a similar system coupled with a miniature sterling engine to get some of this energy back... regenerative braking is the only cool idea to come out of the automotive industry in the last couple decades of supposed innovation.
Fnord.sig
Right, we would have a much better society if we spent all our tax money on welfare instead of defense --- and then the next psychotic petty dictator to come along would come and kick our butt because we wouldn't have any military with which to deter him. :)
I thought the whole emphasis on CPUs was changing from higher clock speed to lower power usage, even in servers. Google's number one requirement is low power usage in their servers.
I'm sure the average PC in the future is going to be using LESS power than today.
The article is here but unfortunatly it's pay per wiew.
The article also mentioned that future (within 2005) CPU's will generate five to ten times more heat.
The feedback mechanism inside this inkjet head included a sensor so the squirt can be directed to the hottest areas. Really cool. No phun intended.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
I'm going to hold out until the inevitable integration with the advanced chemistry found in my Scrubbing Bubbles(r) Bathroom Cleaner.
Then my PC will be heat AND dust free! Less work for Mom!
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.
Today's computers use fans and heat sinks containing fins to help cool circuitry.
That's the problem with today's technology. We keep using Fish in our hardware. No wonder the experts predicted that the smaller the channel, the less heat that would be dissipated (paraphrasing). The fish they were using would not be able to fit though the small channels, thus causing the channel to be blocked!
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Every comparison in the article was with current liquid systems. How much more efficient would this be than the heatsink/fan cooling my Athlon?
I don't see why there is so much effort on dispersing heat... It seems that the only reason systems have a fan is that it's the cheapest cooling method.
Want silent cooling??? Design a case where the healt-sink goes from the processor, to the outer-shell of the case... Presto, no more restricted airflow, and no fans at all.
Convection works well when there is a large surface area (unlike current CPU heatsinks), and there is little impediment to airflow (unlike current systems).
In fact, you could have some incredibly hot systems if you designed a case with a large, EXTERNAL, healtsink, mounted so the top is flush with the case. It could look like a grill on the top of your case instead of a flat piece of metal, but be connected to the CPU with copper/aluminum.
I've always been wondering why nobody designs computers that conduct the CPU heat outside the case. Anybody have some ideas?
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This explains why the Star Trek control panels are always exploding. It's not that they routed main power through a switch on the panel, it's that the fancy-assed graphical display needed a terahertz-class processor to render the warp field display in real-time. That last Romulan disruptor blast just dislodged the heatsink for a few milliseconds and {poof}.
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!
Do you want a zillion computers needing special disposal? Technowaste is a big-enough problem as it is today, lets not RE-introduce a hazardous material that needs to be handled at EOL.
That's what they are. Pretty standard effect. I'm guessing (from a scan of the article) that they've managed some magic concerning the microchannel interface, but the meat of the "discovery" seems to have been lost in favor of the amazing new heat-pipe phenomenon, which has only been around for thirty years.
s .html
Here's an example:
http://www.swales.com/products/heatpipe
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Finally! A dedicated random number generator coprocessor.
The trouble with CPU manufacturers is that they are continuously increasing clockspeed to increase performance. All modern processors use CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) technology. CMOS is great in that the only time it uses substantial power is when the transistors are switched. Unfortunately, the higher the clockspeed, the more often transistors are switched, and the more power is consumed.
New architectures are needed that can do a ton of work per clock cycle. Then, clockspeeds can be reduced greatly, along with power consumption.
I heard an example one time that the human brain works at like 10Hz, and is capable of like 10^15 operations per second, but uses only 80W of power.
I think late great physicist Richard Feynman drew up some equation to describe this relation, but I'm too lazy to look it up.
Cheers!
The articles states:
Innovative cooling systems will be needed in about three years for personal computers expected to contain microprocessor chips that will generate four times more heat than chips in current computers. Whereas current high-performance chips generate about 75 watts per square centimeter, chips in the near future will generate more than 300 watts per square centimeter, Mudawar said.
Who can afford the electric bill to run such machines in their homes? I already stress over the few rooms in my house where I use 100 watt light bulbs instead of 60 or 75 watt bulbs. Can you imagine hooking up your shiney new PC in 2006, then getting an $800 electric bill the next month? Man..
I guess powering down your system when not in use will become more common.
From what my university course taught me, CPU power is composed of 2 factors: dynamic power and static power, where dynamic power is dependent on clock speed and the other is independent of the clock speed. But dynamic power itself is the sum of the switching power (to charge up the transistors) and short circuit power (that split fraction of a second when both transistors are on, causing power to leak through). Both of these factors are directly proportional to the activity factor of the signal (the probability of a signal chaning from 1-to-0 or 0-to-1) The one signal that changes 100% of the time is the system clock. To distribute this one signal to all the individual components of the chip, a lot of power is wasted on generating the clock tree. Maybe we should seriously consider reviving the asynchronous CPU design. This would at least minimize the amount of signal activity. Besides, the faster the processor gets, the more time it spends in the NO_OP state, waiting for data to process. I say we should stop focusing on pumping higher clock rates and focus on other components that ARE TRULY THE BOTTLENECK. eg. memory and storage??? Or even use a different transistor technology, e.g. a CMOS transistor that recycles its charge to power other transistors?
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.
www.GamezCore.com For Hardcore PS2 Gamerz : By Hardcore PS2 Gamerz
Great, now sell me a DIY kit so I can tame this Athlon T-Bird block heater. 50 degrees idle with a 7000-rpm fan.. it's insane!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
For all the non-Microsoft folks out there:
Tiny Bubbles,
...
Running Xine,
Make PC happy,
Make PC fine
(Cue the large beast swallowing the poster in a Monty-Pythonesque cartoon sequence.)
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming