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Doomsday PC-Cooling With Dual-Cascade Coolers
An anonymous reader submits "Four (4) compressors cooling one PC! Yes, it's big, yes it's heavy, yes it's loud and yes it does get your CPU and GPU cold, very cold. Is -100C cold enough for you? Cascade cooling is yet another chapter in a Finnish overclocker's neverending quest for optimal PC performance. Those things go down to -80 to -100C and can maintain the temperature. See here for the whole article with the pictures of the project."
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Doesn't it defeat the purpose of overclocking?
I thought you did that to get more out of your CPU than what you paid for.
If you are spending more on the cooling than on the computer, then why not get a faster one, or a second one (or dual, or whatever)?
Heh, I guess there's the whole hobby "I do it because it's fun!" thing that explains it...
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
I don't know much about this kind of cooling, but if the compressors are being used to cool the air going through these machines, wouldn't they be worried about physically damaging the machines by cracking them? Keeping a computer cool is all well and good, but at a certain temperature the physical elements composing the hardware are bound to contract different amounts, causing damage. Maybe this only happens at -250 degrees, and not -100, but presumably there is a reason that hardware manufacturers state a minimum operating temperature for their components.
Alphanos
Because the colder you make a processor, the further you can push it.
If you can keep a chip at 0 celsius (as you can with many PC cooling units out there), you can get at least another 1GHz out of your chip, meaning your 3GHz PC is now a 4GHz power house.
And so it goes with the lower you go. At -100C you could probably keep your 3GHz PC up at around the 14GHz area, which is way faster than anything on the market. Isn't it worth the money on cooling to experience a slice of tomorrow?
mogorific carpentry experiments
No, but with the right materials and time to develop a Pentium with superconducting transistors, they are only 13 K away from being able to use a "high temperature" superconductor. -100 C is 173 K, and according to my link, one of the highest temperature superconductor they have found works at 160 K. Not that I RTFA; it was /.ed at 50 posts.
The electrons won't move anymore?
With all due respect (since your actual point is correct), you're certainly wrong in regards to electron 'movement'. Unless you're talking about absolute zero (which I doubt, considering the simpleness of your statement), the stage where extreme cooling creates a problem would be when we reach the superconductive state. At this critical temperature, the electrons exhibit the Cooper-Pair phenomenon and exhibit a total spin number of zero. Since they no longer have the same spin, they are exempt from most principles (Pauli's in particular) and so can all drop down to the 1s orbital.
In short, the electrons don't stop moving. In fact, they drop to such a state where they can theoretically move with zero resistance (although drift velocity and the randomness of their wave equations would come into play here).
What you should actually be pointing at is the design of the chip, which may not simply be able to do more, regardless of how much heat is dissipated due to consumption (generating lattice fluctuations and increasing resistance). As well, quantum tunneling becomes a major issue, but this isn't as important as the sheer limit of the architecture.