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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."
An OEM heat pipe is nifty, but anyone can buy one to add on.
I'm still waiting for one of Intel/AMD to come out with a chip package that comes with an integrated heatsink or at least heat spreader. Current packaging squishes everything into a 1cm square, then pastes it onto a 3cm PCB that's only that big to get enough I/O pins.
I want to see a chip that integrates a heat spreader directly into the package, so you have some more space to interface for a bigger, more bad-ass heatsink or even heat pipe.
Yes, I do realize that the smaller the chip the larger the yields as far as silicon or SOI goes, but that's actual chip versus the plastic/ceramic/whatever that they use to keep it from being destroyed when you breathe on it. A bigger chunk of that stuff would help a lot, since it could be a single piece instead of one material against another against another, each of which has its own thermal efficiency loss.
AMD keeps making processors that run hotter and hotter and they get applauded for including adequate cooling this time? Please. It's kind of retarded to worry about desktop processor size when the *mandatory* cooling device is the size of a brick. It's like saying you developed a new optical disc the size of a postage stamp that holds 1000x times more information than a CD *BUT* the drive to read such media fills a garage...