Slashdot Mirror
On-CPU Peltiers From AMD?
Hack Jandy writes "Remember those people who lived on the edge and put peltiers between their CPU and heatsink (or your favorite beverage)? A peltier is a devices that gets cold on one side and warm on the other when an electrical current passes through it. It looks like there is talk that AMD will actually incorporate some of these devices on the CPU according to Xbitlabs. AMD already incorporates some degree of the peltier effect with it's Silicon on Insulator."
dont put it on the wrong way.
How long will it be till coke starts thier new advertising campaign..What 'flavor' cpu do you run???
The problem with peltier coolers is that if it breaks down, the once cooling surface becomes an insulator. Plus, if the hot side gets too hot, the cooling process breaks down, so anyone using this would have to use a cooler that can draw the heat away as fast as the CPU-side peltier can kick it out, which would probably be another, larger peltier.
I'd rather stick to external cooling systems that I can monitor and replace if necessary.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
it's == contraction for "it is": "It's a peltier device."
its == possessive for it: "AMD has a peltier-like effect with its Silicon on Insulator technology."
IT'S (pun intended) NOT THAT HARD, PEOPLE!
Actually, the funny thing is, this hasn't been true for years. Intel CPUS put out quite a lot more wattage (~90w) compared to AMD's top end silicon, around 70 watts. But it made for a mildly funny joke back when the t-bird was spanking the socket 423 chips.
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
I have had limited experience with Peltiers in the context of CPU overclocking, and I must say, my impression was that they're not all they're cracked up to be. Yeah, with a large enough cooler, you can drop the temp of the CPU significantly, but the effect is dependent on your ability to remove the heat from the other side (which is in excess of that given off by the CPU to begin with). A good water-cooling solution works well enough without the need for the extra drop in temp.
get with the times dude. Intel chips have been running hotter for a while now, due to thier need(strategy) to push higher and higher frequencies.
Just imagine the amount of power required for something like that. Each core of a dual core 65nm CPU will need at least 70 watts of power, giving 140 watts total. In order for a peltier to be useful, the wattage has to be greater than that of the CPUs. So with only the CPU and Pelt, that is a minimum of 300 watts, with something between 400 and 500 being more likely. That is an absurd amount of power and heat.
eclecti.cc
I don't know where you get this information, but the new AMDs are somewhat cooler running that the top end Pentium 4s.
As for heat coming from the other side, that's one of the issues that an on-chip Peltier would alleviate, but presenting a cooler surface to the CPU on the side with the heatsink.
*cough* preshott *cough* Finally AMD doesn't have the "hottest" CPU on the market :D
Then again, give it until next cores are released ...
just my 2 bytes
Well this is good news! Anything to keep CPUs cooler as they heat up - especially the AMDs, which have always run hotter. Seems like everyone's paying more attention to these kinds of issues. Of course, I'm waiting for AMD to include some kind of liquid-cooling device IN the CPU package. Or maybe a jug of liquid nitrogen...
Leonard Peltier, a citizen of the Anishinabe and Lakota Nations, is a father, a grandfather, an artist, a writer, and an Indigenous rights activist. He has spent more than twenty-seven years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Amnesty International considers him a "political prisoner" who should be "immediately and unconditionally released."
Not only would it be a stylish way to cool your CPU, you could use it as a random number generator.
The 1990's called, they want your facts back. If anything, lately its Intels P4 generating more heat overall. Anandtech has a useful article on the issue http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2026
heres a link to todays top end comparison:4 17
http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/7
hot on one side, cold on the other. sounds like my bed.
just because they have a patent on it doesn't mean that AMD will actually produce cpu's with peltier elements built into the heatspreader.
As mentioned already, Peltier junctions act as heat pumps. In other words, you put work in to extract heat from the processor, this extra work turning into (you guessed it) even more heat.
While it might contribute to the cooling of the processor, you'll need an even bigger heat-sink and fan stuck on top to dissipate all the extra heat...
(Rant: why can't all processors be like the one in my iBook, designed for power efficiency as well as performance?)
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
is not just the total amount of heat they put out, but the fact that they put out that much heat over an area of about one square centimeter (on the 90nm process at least). As the physical piece of silicon shrinks, the thermal density increases. More transistors switching on and off in a smaller area, and the drop in Vcc isnt enough to counteract the increase in density (we were at 1.8v or so with the 180nm process, and now at 90nm, we're at 1.4v or so - some chips dynamically change voltage and multiplier based on demand). I'm not sure this will do a whole lot of good if you just try to disapate the heat from the processor and the heat introducted by the peltier effect over the same square centimeter. You'd need to disapate the heat over a much larger area, say 10 sq cm. They you can stay in the realm of air-cooling instead of watercooling.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
stop spamming your referral link asshole
Ahahah! That's freaking hilarious! Thanks for posting that!
Does not look so good, does it ? Let's try the other form:
Right here... much better :)
This simple trick brought to you by someone fed up to see such gross mistakes allowed to make it to frontpages.
"A peltier is a devices that gets cold on one side and warm on the other..."
come up with your own shit. my g/f patented this 'technology' years ago
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
AMD is patenting this as a way of *getting around* of SOI disadvantages. SOI means silicon on insulator , which is in this case SiO2, which is also excellent thermal (not only electrical) insulator. AMD says that SiO2 conducts heat at least hundred times less than silicon.
What they are saying is that transistors on SOI might behave better, but they are certainly running hotter than their classic countepairs, since layer of SiO2 stands between them and the cooling system.
So AMD is proposing several schemes of embedding TEC device into the insulating layer in the silicon. This layer would:
1. Decrease overall thermal resisstance of the cooling path
2. When powered on, offer bigger thermal diferential, since it could cool embedded side of the TEC significantly below the cooler temperature.
It is unclear if they intend to use this on the whole chip, or just the especially hot areas...
They are, just the performance is a hell of a lot higher and so the power usage goes up as well.
Check out the power usage figures on a modern G5...they might be less than a Prescott (so is a curling iron, for that matter), but they aren't much better than an Athlon64.
Jesus people, quit modding up referral link spammers! This post has no useful content; it is only a ruse to get a spam link displayed on slashdot. I meta-mod unfair anyone who mods up a referral spammer, no matter what the comment actually says. Same for idiots who mod up known trolls such as Fecal Troll Matter. No need to help someone karma whore their account in advance of a trolling session.
Another flamebait. Processors are getting hotter and hotter. Intel used to generally do better in power consumption than AMD. But that period has ended years ago when Willamette core P4 was out. Have you compared the heatsink size of Prescott core P4 and that of AMD64?
I'd be more worried about the heat coming from the other side. My case is hot enough as is, no need to add to it
RTFA. Which "other side" are you talking about?
According to the wikipedia article, peltier effect is "the creation of heat difference from an eletric voltage." Namely, a peltier moves heat from one point to the other with the help of a electric field.
In this case, the peltier moves heat away from one side, the processor, to the other side, the heat sink, and the later then extracts the heat away. It helps conducting heat when the temperature difference between the CPU surface and the heatsink is higher. Although as a semiconductor itself, the peltier also generate heat. That is far less than the heat it takes away from the core and that heat is in effect taken away as well. So I don't know what you mean by "adding heat to it".
People who dislike China tend to mention Tiananmen Square a lot, but they always forget the Tank Man is also a Chinese.
I remember that SGI once used peltiers and they had to recall them because of failures due to corrosion due to condendsation because the device temperatures fell below the dew point.
Processor Requirements: -Custom Watercooling System -Massive PSU -Alot of $
Maybe I'm wrong here, but it doesn't sound like AMD would be using the peltier as a replacement for the fan and heatsink, but rather building in a peltier into the silicon itself to pump the heat out of the CPU core itself faster, so that the heatsink and cooling fan on top can keep the core cooled. As someone mentioned, as we increase the density of the cpu die itself, the thermal density is also decreased and thus the problem becomes getting the heat from the core of the silicon wafer out to the outside of the chip or wafer itself. If we put peltier material into the wafer, we can electronically pump this heat to the surface where traditional cooling devices can disappate it into the air
The key thing with peltiers is that they just *move* heat.
Which is exactly what your domestic refrigerator does, merely moves heat from the inside via the evaporator to the outside to the condenser. In fact heat cannot be destroyed at all (think conversation of energy), merely moved elsewhere.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
Compare that 350 square cm to the area of a processor core, about 1 square cm, with twice the total heat dissipation. You can see how removing the heat is a huge problem. Compare the hot spots of the core, like the scheduler and active functional units, which use much more energy per area than the average, and you can see the problem getting much worse.
A peltier integrated into a core would be all about moving heat away from the tiny core as quickly as possible to a larger surface, such as a heat sink contact plate and a heat sink, so that it can be dissipated quickly. Even if heat dissipation in future cores went down, with smaller processes leading to smaller cores, the problem of heat dissipation would still get bigger.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
"Advanced Micro Devices, one of the world's leading makers of central heating units, has patented a technology...."
Isotopically pure silicon is supposed to decrease leakage current and improve thermal conduction. AMD was said to explore this path. Any updates?
Peltier is the guy who discovered the effect. A peltier junction (sometimes called a peltier cooler, which is a stupid name because it's also a heater) is the solid-state heat pump. A peltier junction is not called a peltier.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I suppose this will be strictly for their desktop processors, since the Peltier effect truly consumes a very large ammount of power. I couldn't see this technology being used in any rational way on a mobile proc, and since the two markets are converging, I question this move from AMD. Anyway, it will be interesting to see in what form this technology is actually realized...
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Q = Heat transfer rate
U = thermal conductivity coefficient of the 2 surfaces
A = area of the surfaces in contact
dT = delta T temperature difference
A peltier allows the dT to be much greater (on both sides) so you can transfer more heat in the same space, or the same amount of heat in a smaller space.
The hot side of the peltier can get VERY hot so air-cooling 130 degree fins with 35 degree air much easier than cooling 45 degree fins with 35 degree air.
He has spent more than twenty-seven years in prison for a crime he did not commit.
He colluded with alternating N- and P-type semiconductors to rob systems of thermal energy that wasn't his to begin with!
Now he's cooling his heels in prison.
...use the devil's own beer fridge !
Non-Linux Penguins ?
God save me from a hot beer.
I read about peltiers in Popular Science, just want to spread the joy.
Karma: Good, or bust!
While you are right that Peltier devices move heat from one side (the cool side) to the other (the hot side), they also generate a HECK of alot of waste heat themselves. So, great for cooling CPUs, but ussually used only in conjunction with other "extreme" coolers such as a watercooler or a bong. This is because, the more you cool the hot side, the colder the cold side will be. Peltiers are unique amoung extreme cooling in that they can actually cool lower (ussually far lower, when used in conjunction with other extreme technologies) than room temperature. Extreme OC'ers have sometimes (often!) destroyed their systems by letting water wapour condense onto the back of the sub-zero CPUs!
They're really quite amazing devices. I saw one when they first came onto the consumer PC market, about 4 years ago. Bloke had hooked it up to a car battery, and poured some drinking water onto it. Muttered something about the battery being flat, and a few seconds later scraped *ice* of the surface of the Peltier. They're also used to cool scientific equipment, such as CCD imaging devices in medium-to-high power telescopes.
DanielOnce Intel and AMD accept the heat losses associated with the smaller dimension gates because they can just pipe the heat away, the MHZ wars will return.
I can't speak for AMD, but I'm positive Intel uses Minx pelts.
- Gentlemen, start your hybrids!
...Posting like anyone cares...
;-)
In the middle [8 of 14] of a "-DU world" and my 2.2Ghz AMD64 is sitting at around 42C with a simple heatsink/fan.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
And I thought I was dreaming that last night, thanks for confirming it. Now to rid myself of those extra voices in my head.
Peltiers are very inefficient and therefore will cause your computer system to need a lot more cooling. The cool chip stuff
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
They are using more transistors at a higher frequency to get the same job done. IT'S not a big secret that this will cost more power, which lets the chips run hotter. That's why Intel needed a completely new chip for their notebook lineup, whereas AMD can use their old designs.
Intel does seem to be somewhat more aware of the issue than AMD though. I like their CPU fans better (appart from the trash they put on their PII slot processor boards), they've got thermal shutdown inside the processor and if I may believe another thread, the CPU uses less power when there is not much to do.
I thought it was because the Mossad stole all the answers.
Therefore, my point is, Peltiers as a cpu cooling device may have shortcomings like efficiency and condensing, but nothing a careful design can't avoid.
Freddie
People who dislike China tend to mention Tiananmen Square a lot, but they always forget the Tank Man is also a Chinese.
As long as someone rids the world of thermal paste, I will be happy. There has never been a more annoying substance that that crap.
Apple didn't invent water cooling or heat pipes. They weren't the first to put either into a PC form factor. Both water cooling and heat pipes are, in fact, regular components of PC hardware and have been for many years.
Why do Apple fanboys always feel the need to inject irrelevant comments about Apple into every single discussion?
AMD64's throttle down their clockrate and voltage depending on load. I think their max TDP in most desktop situations is about 35W, which is somewhere along the lines of a 500MHz PII.
I've heard from another thread AMD64's also have P4-alike thermal throttling/shutdown as well, but I've yet to verify this.
s/it's/IT IS/ig on your text and you'll get it right nearly every time. And for some of us, apostrophes speak as loudly as upper case.
The use of the apostrophe rule for posession is overridden by the rule that posessive pronouns don't use apostrophes. Besides, we've enough ambiguities on the language as it is.
Use of parentheses to override this precedence will result in a syntax error.
Extreme OC'ers have sometimes (often!) destroyed their systems by letting water wapour condense onto the back of the sub-zero CPUs!
I made a similar comment in another thread: pure water doesn't conduct electricity. Nor does pure ice. The only damage from condensed water you get is oxidation of metal conductors and possibly cracking if ice forms in or under components. Coffee on the other hand seems to be a very good conductor...
The heat dissipated by a heat sink (with a fan or not) is a linear function of the temperature of the surface of the heat sink.
So if I have a CPU which puts out, say, 100W of heat, and I have a particular size of heatsink, the temperature of the heat sink will rise until the dissipation of the sink is 100W (or the chip melts). Say my heatsink dissipates 100W at 100C. (All numbers are made up.) Let it conduct perfectly, too, to simplify the discussion. If I put out more than 100W, the temperature of the heat sink will rise a little.
If my CPU is directly connected to the heat sink, its surface will be at 100C. If I have a Peltier that is configured to be 20 cooler on the cold side, then the CPU surface would be only 80C (assuming the Peltier consumes no power). So if my CPU is designed to run at 80C, the Peltier is fine; alternatively, I could get a bigger heat sink or a CPU fan.
So you could use the Peltier for overclocking, to reduce the needed size of the heatsink, or to remove the need for a fan. A given heatsink will be able to dissipate more heat for a given CPU temperature (since the CPU is cooler than the heatsink).
Apple used peltiers on the Powermac 6100... those PowerPC 601 where hot !
Apple, as aways, is 10 years ahead on some fronts, and 2 years behind on others...
He can't spell for a damn!
How long before someone from jackass puts a peltier on their gooch.
What do Slashdot editors do, anyway?
I want my liquid helium cooling rig...
- Was I writing a doctoral thesis? No. I wonder if this guy stops friends in mid-sentence saying something like "It's isn't, not ain't. Ain't isn't a word."
But being that I technically am incorrect, I try to make note and correct myself in the future.So what does all this have to do with the correction at hand? Well, while you were busy worrying about it's/its, you've completely missed the fact that it isn't AMD's SOI technology. Credit belongs to IBM for their Power processor line. It was licensed by Motorola for G3/G4 production, and originally made it into AMD chips at Motorola fabrication plants. Moto's copper and IBM's SOI gave you X86er's your big Gigahertz speed boost at a time when Motorola was facing brain drain thanks to Intel. PowerPCs had the tech first, but lacked the engineers to capitalize on it. I'm sure AMD has had their hand in improvements to the technology since then, but if we're gonna be picky, how about being picky over factual mistakes first. Those things matter a whole lot more to me than the position of an apostrophe.
Much obliged :-)
Your sig, it's too long. Switch to binary and use an abreviation: 0x49 0x41 0x4E 0x41 0x4C
be to the point
Better yet, for an improved readability just say it in ASCII: IANAL.
You can't handle the truth.
Heh, the hex I like, but what's the fun in putting it in plaintext? ;-)
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
None of my business, but if you want a meaningfull sig., so that people knew what the hell you are talking about? Say, if 5 people had sig in binary, how different would it look? It doesn't matter, I am going to sleep.
You can't handle the truth.
Now he's cooling his heels in prison.
is the heat coming out his head + interest?
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
The problem is that the heat sink has to dissipate the heat from the CPU and the heat from the peltier itself. Lets say that, for example, the peltier used 20 watts to get that 20C (a real peltier would use MUCH more). This means that the heat sink has to dissipate an additional 20 watts, and as you said, this means that the temperature of the heat sink rises. Lets say it rises 20 degrees. Now, you have your 20 degree difference bringing your CPU temp to 100C, right where you started. All you have done is waste power and heat up your case. In reality, a peltier would require a larger heatsink than a bare chip in order to make the chip cooler, since you are dissipating the heat from both the peltier and the CPU. The real advantage of the peltier is its ability to cool the CPU below the case temperature, but doing so requires a very large heatsink (or something more serious like water cooling).
It's not hard to ignore (turn sigs off if it really annoys you) and it takes under 20 seconds to find a tool via Google to convert it to a string. I'm not the GP.
According to an old Slashdot article a British company called Cool Chip Plc has something that uses the "Quantum Mechanical Electron Tunneling" to achive "unbelievable cooling efficiencies".
According to the Press Release it is claimed that the device is so good that "a panel about two inches square will have the capacity to provide the air conditioning for a living room" !
In comparison, according to Cool Chips's press release, most existing cooling systems use compressors and environment-damaging fluids and are 40-50% efficient. Smaller thermoelectric cooling devices, despite more than $1 billion spent on research, are only 8% efficient. Cool Chips, on the other hand, are projected to operate at 70-80% of the maximum theoretical efficiency (Carnot) for cooling.
I am not affliated with "coolchips" in any way, just in case you wonder.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
According to this site, a 40x40mm peltier device consumes 33.4 watts and drops the temprature 69 degrees C.
You could cascade three together for 100 watts and a 207 degree C drop.
But 40x40 mm is about 4 square inches, and if a chip needs one that's 3x3 inches (9 square inches) then it's probably take about twice as much power. But still not likely over 100 watts. 100 watts to move 100 watts of heat. Sounds right.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
pure water doesn't conduct electricity Thanks for the info; I wasn't aware of that. Coffee on the other hand seems to be a very good conductor... Interesting you should say that - my dad had the idea (only half-jokingly) of building a drip coffee-maker into a computer case, and using the CPU's HSF as the heat source. (Because a 2AM during a coding challenge, what does a geek need but more caffiene?) I didn't think it could heat the water hot enough and still cool the processer, so we never tried.
Since the original article contain this and not just some reply, let me say once and for all: "it's" means "it is", "it was", or "it has". It is NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT a posessive. In case anyone wonders what a posessive is, it's where you add "s" or "'s" to a noun, and it becomes an adjective whose semantics are that the adjective owns -- or is somehow related to -- the noun that the adjective modifies.
Once would think that all you geeky technical people would have latched onto this distinction at some point, especially considering most of you are pretty good at syntax (this being sort of the analog of the slightly-obscure- but-helpful sematic rule that disambiguates else statements when there is more than one level of if keywpord), but still most geeke show a remarkable ability to grok synthetic languages without figuring out how to write in English.
You forgot Poland.
Perhaps this might help. http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInforma tion/0,,30_118_9485_9487%5E10272,00.html
AMD Cool'n'Quiet(TM) Technology Overview
All good things...
I think most people are missing the advantage of having the Peltier junction in the CPU.
If you sit a Peltier junction on top of a chip, you can't cool the chip much unless you insulate the board, and processor from the air (not trivial). If the processor gets too cool, humidity in the air starts to condense, and you short out the board.
On the other hand, if the cooler is integrated into the processor, then you can maintain the interior of the package at a very low temperature (increasing the efficiency of the core), while keeping the exterior temperature constant (not cooling the whole package).
This means that you avoid the condensation problem.
This is the same reason that scientific CCD's often have a built-in Peltier junction. Higher operating temperature leads to higher noise (unwanted in already dim images). So you cool the CCD. Only if the cooler is external to the CCD, you cause condensation. So you take the cooler, and wedge it up to the CCD, inside of a vacuum case, with the hot side of the cooler against the case. This way, the CCD stays nice and frigid, while the cooler can do it's job.
If you don't believe me about the prominance of such devices, google 'cooled CCD'.
I'm not completely sure about the reliability of Peltiers, but considering the they are simply a bunch of metal junctions (as long as they are in contact, they function), they should not deteriorate very quickly. Perhaps by overheating them, you can make them oxidize, but I doubt this would happen inside a CPU package. (Your CPU probably has more significant chance of being eaten by a wild leopard)
Does anyone else find it amusing that the device is commonly called a Peltier cooler, even though it operates via the Seebeck effect? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peltier_effect
These don't exist except in theory. Use something real instead.
Split infinitives are really pretty much becoming acceptable these days, and they were never really frowned upon that heavily.
Except by high school english teachers.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.