Cooling Down Hot Processors

DonnaMai writes "Face it: the only scorching hot thing you want with a chip is salsa. Any other overheating is potentially counterproductive, and can be downright damaging to the microprocessor -- or other components. This article uncovers potential ways to chill the chips."

Comments

Cool Processors

[Pan T. Hose]

How do I cool processors? Simple: I underclock them. Even a 10-20% less MHzs is usually enough to get rid of a noisy fan, i.e. the most stupid idea in the history of personal computers. Most of today's computers are I/O-bound anyway (Moore's law) so there is no performance loss whatsoever. Seems like an obvious solution.

And why was this article accepted?!

[William_Lee]

There was nothing new or innovative in the article, and it had the depth of Paris Hilton as far as actual real world cooling suggestions.

There are a ton of different solutions out there both onchip and off including aircooling via different heatsink designs, watercooling, peltier cooling, and self contained refrigeration units.

This article barely scraped the surface of anything useful or interesting related to cooling.

Oh wait, this is /. I forgot for a moment...

Re:cool chips

[doublem]

The problem is software bloat.

If applications were coded as if there were actual restrictions, if speed and efficency were a consideration, then this would be a valid option. 90% of the processing power in a computer would only be used when playing a game.

Sadly, we live in a world where the OPERATING SYSTEM will soon require a 3D card to even function. (Windows Longhorn)

The bottom line is, despite significant advances in hardware, the "User Experience" still feels as sluggish and slow as it did in the days of Windows 3.1 on a 386. How much does XP do that the average user needs that Windows 3.1 and Word 2.0 couldn't? Can you IMAGINE how fast Windows 3.1 would be on modern hardware if the drivers existed?

What a disappointment

[Noose For A Neck]

Here I was, all set to read an interesting article about technical solutions to the problem of heat transfer on microelectronic chips, and instead all I get is a bunch of fluffy gibberish that looks like it was written by a sophomore communications major in college.

Color this mechanical engineer disappointed.

Plagiarised again?

[Osty]

From the Slashdot summary

Face it: the only scorching hot thing you want with a chip is salsa. Any other overheating is potentially counterproductive, and can be downright damaging to the microprocessor -- or other components. This article uncovers potential ways to chill the chips."

and from the first paragraph of the article itself

Face it: the only scorching hot thing you want with a chip is salsa. Any other overheating is potentially counterproductive, and can be downright damaging to the microprocessor -- or other components. In this Power Architecture challenge, developers warm up to the idea of how to cool down the hotter processors. From the weird to the wonderful, readers uncover potential ways to chill the chips.

Aside from the removal of one sentence and a slight re-wording of the last, this is word for word the introduction to the article. If you were to submit this in a paper for a college (or even high school!) class, you'd be a good candidate for a plagiarism investigation.

Once again, Slashdot editors, there's a very simple way to deal with this -- change the author attribution. Rather than saying, "DonnaMai writes ...", use "DonnaMai quotes ..." or "DonnaMai poorly paraphrases ...". By properly citing the summary as a quotation or paraphrasing* of the article, you would avoid the impression of plagiarism.

* Yes, paraphrasing is allowed by fair use. In fact, if you're going to summarize an article, you want to paraphrase. However, paraphrasing is not, "Copy a sentence with a changed word here, drop a sentence there." You need to write a summarization in your own words, not take the article's words and (poorly) "massage" them so that they're not 100% identical (90% identical is still a problem).