AMD Ships Heavy Duty Cooling With Latest Processor

jmke writes "With the increasing heat output of recent processors both Intel and AMD are shipping larger and heavier heatsink/fan combo's to cool them down. AMD has now incorporated heat pipe technology, which is usually only found in more expensive third party CPU cooling solutions. This test compares the new heatsink to a popular 3rd party product and it turns out that the new AMD unit is very impressive: high performance and silent operation from a free CPU cooler? AMD has done it! Now if only Intel would follow."

Comments

Nice, but...

[squoozer]

...when do we hit the hit wall. I know that we can got for liquid cooling etc etc but we must surely be approaching the point where processors can't get much fast simply because the cooling solutions are becoming impractical.

Fair enough there will be some people that will be happy to have cryo units strapped to the side of their boxen but I think most computers are already a little on the large side considering what's in them.

I suppose one thing that hasn't been done on a large scale yet is ducted inputs and outputs. I imagine having the ability to draw in cooler air from outside the case would make for a fair advantage but this would require a redesign of the basic case which manufacturers are loathed to do.

I would be interested to know if anyone has studied this problem and come to any conculsions about whether will will hit the limit of Moore's law first or just be unable to cool a processor first.

Re:Nice, but...

[faloi]

I imagine having the ability to draw in cooler air from outside the case would make for a fair advantage but this would require a redesign of the basic case which manufacturers are loathed to do.

Intel has a spec for TAC (Thermally Advantaged Chassis) that a lot of vendors are conforming to. It's basically a design guide that offers recomendations to ensure good air flow.