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IBM Doubles CPU Cooling With Simple Change
Ars Technica is reporting that IBM has discovered a new cooling breakthrough that, unlike several other recent announcements, should be relatively easy and cost-effective to implement. "IBM's find addresses how thermal paste is typically spread between the face of a chip and the heat spreader that sits directly over the core. Overclockers already know how crucial it is to apply thermal paste the right way: too much, and it causes heat buildup. Too little, and it causes heat buildup. It has to be "just right," which is why IBM looked to find the best way to get the gooey stuff where it needs to be and in the right amount, and to make it significantly more efficient in the process."
I find it kind of funny that after all these years of proper modders polishing the hell out of thier heatsink and spreader, along comes IBM and makes them rough and it cools better :)
That said, its probably only better in the average case but less good than the ideal case due to the fact of having less contact in the microgroove areas.
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It doesn't help power consumption, but better cooling = less fans = less noise. I wish I had a server in the basement, that is if I had a basement (no, I'm not living in one).
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Everything about putting together a new computer, or installing a new chip set is pretty straight-forward, except for the thermal paste. While nothing is to complicated, it is the only factor that is not clearly right or wrong depending on how you do it. Couple that with it being the hardest thing to reach in/on the computer, I am glad to see some changes are being made. It would be nice to simplify the process down to be just as easy as setting the fan on top of it.
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a cheap way to simulate IBM's invention, just scratch the surface with a razor.. make a bunch of diagonal cuts across each other.. smooth it out a little bit with a brillo pad and you're ready to rock & roll. Worth a try, with amd X2's at $75, why the hell not.
Namaste
This is the same "breakthrough" they came out with five months ago, only applying the same technique to the two facing surfaces rather than just the one.
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They etched a series of microgrooves on the surface of the headsink to act as a channel for excess thermal paste. This is supposed to make much better contact than a smooth surface.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
When i ordered my Artic Silver compound, the website had some instructions on how to apply the paste depending on what type of CPU you own. These instructions can be applied to any kind of thermal paste.
here's a link.
http://www.arcticsilver.com/instructions.htm
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this isn't taught where I work, and as a result oftentimes we get the units we fixed sent right back for overheating and shutting down. Pop off the heatpipe and fan assemly on the laptop mtherboard, and whoa-nelly! The ENTIRE SURFACE OF THE PROCESSOR'S COATED with thermal paste.
Each tube of thermal paste we get contains about 4CCs worth of thermal paste - MORE than enough to handle about seven or so CPUs. Instead, the entire tube gets shot onto the proc, because the syring is labeled "Single use only" (Yea, that's what I thought.)
Roughing the surface of the core casing seems like a good idea, but I dunno, most thermal compounds are rather gritty as is and wont' fit into those uber-tiny grooves. A more liquid thermal ahesive would see to be a better idea if you're going to mar the surface of the core's protective casing, I would think.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
If you'd ever taken the time to actually try lapping the heatsink and heat spreaders rather than making fun, you would notice a significant drop in temperatures.
Even today with the new Core 2 Duo CPUs, the IHS have been found to be concave. Personally having lapped my CPU, the load temperatures dropped 10 C - nothing to sneeze at.
This article is more about the refinement of a technique. Notice how the article states "micrometer-length trenches", and not surfaces filled with ridges you can feel by running along it with your finger nail.
Most overclockers know that you get diminishing returns the further you polish the surfaces anyway.
When will someone get a clue and power CPU fans with Stirling Engines?
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
Well, tell me something new. We all know already the problems with the gooey stuff when it gets too hot.
IBM looked to find the best way to get the gooey stuff where it needs to be and in the right amount
I know some sites with plenty of AVIs that will show you how to do that...
Story is here.
I could be wrong, but I believe that the polishing was done back in the day when the core was exposed (back in the Athlon days) so that the heatsink would make the best contact it could with the core. The core was such a small dense area that the best contact possible was needed. Now that everyone has a spreader on their core(s) the spreader itself does most of the immediate heat relieving and the contact between the spreader and cooler is much larger. With the larger area of contact using the super polished method it is much harder to get an even 'sandwich' across the entire area of the spreader, thus the move to the rougher finish.
Nowadays, this counts as a patentable innovation.
For the last computer I built, the AMD CPU came with a little patch of thermal paste rather than a tube. I just put it on like a sticker and bolted down the heatsink. No muss, no fuss. Many friends told me to turn in my propeller beanie for not using silver paste, but it overclocked just fine (only 10%--I was scared to go higher)and stayed cool enough.
It seems to me that if you come up with some "magic cross" defying pattern, you could sell it in little pre-spread patches. In fact, I'm sure the same companies who make shitty paste that turn out to have no silver in them at all are already working on it, regardless of any IBM patents on the process. Oooo, I gotta go, I just had an idea: New, improved, thermally-quilted paste patches. I'll be rich.
And if you did, you will know that the thermal paste itself is very inefficient for its thermal properties compared to the metal surface of the heatsink. What IBM has found out is a way to cheaply and quickly put a heatsink on the CPU which uses less thermal paste (1/3 less), which results in a 50% increase in cooling capability of the heatsink. What they don't tell you is that the idea way is to spread the paste using a hard straight edge with a uniform height over the cpu itself and apply an extremely smooth heatsink to this. But, this process takes too long for it to be worth it in mass production. It typically takes me 2-3 minutes to spread the thermal compound and mount the heatsink on a chip. In a production line, it needs to take 5-20 seconds.
All IBM has done is develop a better method compared to their previous less efficient method. It is still worse then someone taking the time to lap the heatsink level and smooth and properly spread the true correct amount of thermal compound on the CPU then IBM's new method. To give you an idea, IBM is still using around 10x more thermal compound then is used in hand built systems. As you saw, a 1/3 reduction resulted in 50% increase in performance. Imagine then what a 9/10 reduction would result... The compound itself has the highest/worst thermal co-efficient in the cooling system. It makes a lot of sense that getting less of it in there will increase the performance. The key to reducing this substance is having a heatsink that will fit perfectly flush with the CPU.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
when i bought a new mobo to slide behind my AMD i bought some thermal paste from a local ma & pa computer store and the paste came in a hypodermic syringe (sans needle) and i asked them about it and they said just use it all, it seemed to be the right amount, my CPU runs about 110 Fahrenheit unless i am compiling software for a long time and then i seen it get as high as 125, then i open the cover to let the tower breathe better and it usually drops back down to around 115...
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If I get this right the secret is to insert the goo into a radiator shaped slot between the radiator and the top of the chip. Basically put more surface area between the goo and the radiator.
Isn't there a solid material someone can invent to transfer the heat from the chip to the radiator? Like a thin gold foil material that conducts the heat from the top of the CPU to the bottom of the aluminum heat sink? Maybe we start to need to make heatsinks out of something better than the cheapest shlock we have on hand? Maybe we need to cast heatpipes right into the top of the chip?
This technique is simply increasing the surface area interface between the paste and the heat sink, with a side effect: poor paste application will result in a much smaller interface. Sounds bad.
Although this might be superior in someone's theory (and please explain what theory), I have doubts that it'll be effective in practice: the overall thermal interface will be identical in size, and the thermal mass will be more or less the same.
That's great. Where can I buy such an applicator to put on the thermal paste like this?
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for something like a CPU which (if you are a big enough nerd) gets taken out swapped..etc occasionally.. how much harder would it be to get the old paste off... in order to have fresh new (effective) paste on when reinstalling the CPU???
for the record after years of overclockers lapping their cpu's to a mirror surface i am amused that IBM now says the rough surface is more effective =p
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
Actually copper is an extremely efficient heat conduit. The reason why you use a paste instead of a solid is that even a polished surface will have irregularities in it. The paste will have a significantly larger amount of surface contact than any solid layer.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
IBM: My cooling powers have doubled since the last time we met.
AMD/Intel: Good. Twice the pride, double the heat.
I'd agree with that in this case. They took existing product and made an improvement to it. How long do you think it took them to determine that cross-hatched X pattern was ideal?
It's also relatively novel, compared to the general trend of having the smoothest surface possible. I'd get one of these, mostly because I'm too lazy and inexperienced with the full on lapping and polishing method.
It is less funny when you realize that the roughness stands in a direct relationship to the size of the metal bits in the paste. If all you can get between the valleys of a roughened copper heat sink is the binding mass instead of the silver particles because their too large then you will have a rather bad heat conduction. If you however get the surface rough and the silver particles are as small as nano particles, then you might get what IBM has achieved: much more surface and lots of contact.
"IBM looked to find the best way to get the gooey stuff where it needs to be and in the right amount, and to make it significantly more efficient in the process"
IBM certainly is branching out!
...which is the exact same reason a mason uses a notched trowel to spread thinset when laying ceramic tile.
I don't think this is referring to the system builder applying the big copper bahemoths we put on top of our CPU, but actually the way the manufacturer puts the big silver heat spreader on top of the little black core (from the first sentance in the abstract).
How come nobody makes a CPU with the heat spreader and the main Heat sink as one solid piece? Then you'd only have one junction that needs goo, between the die and the heat spreader, right? Or am I oversimplifying the problem?
Last Month.
I saw this at LEAST a few months ago...
What they have now achieved can ultimately be achieved through the use of liquid-metal heat conductors. The liquid metal will fill any gaps on the surfaces and deep down to an atomic level, creating the best contact imaginable.
That' is exactly right. They just made it easier to do quickly. Back in the day, I ran little Thoroughbred B core AMD's for over 3ghz; the only reason they stayed running is because of the connection between heatsink and CPU. The issue is not the amount of heat you can move from the heatsink (with newer heatsinks), but rather how fast you can move it away from the CPU. On some of my really high over clocking experiments it's not possible to even use a heatsink, but rather I need to force cool the die it's self... but that's not a problem for manufacturers yet ;)
The micro ridges help with the paste, but I am amazed that they do not have much bigger ridges in the surface, After all it is about surface area as well. A set of defined waves going through the top will allow for an increase in the SA and to pull the heat upwards away from from the chip.
Make the top of the cpu's copper slug corrugated or dimpled, sin(x) and sin(x) + sin(y) respectively. Doing this will create more surface area for heat transfer. You can then use a piece of malleable gold foil to fill in any gaps.
One of those why didn't I think of that moments... D'oh!
Err, I thought that it was to reduce build-up and naturally spread more evenly, the whole magic cross thing.
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
but also GPUs, I installed one of these bad boys: thermaltake schooner, but before I bought it I did some research and the reviewers claimed that the x800 pro from ATI would run at about 92 degrees Celsius under load, that was a bit worrying, but I took the chance and installed it. My card has never been above 80 with that heat sink, and I think the difference is in how and what type of compound used. I didn't use the supplied compound, but went with arctic silver instead, also I paid special notice to the instructions, most GPUs are slightly concave, so you have to be extra careful when applying the paste.
GP post is wrong: better cooling = less fans = less noise.
Better cooling here means a cooler CPU. But the EXACT same amount of heat (TDP) is being dissipated from it (just more efficiently). And that same amount of heat has to be pushed outside the case, so just as many fans are required to push the air in/out the case. So same noise too. Not that making quiet PCs is hard these days, the parts are all available (quiet fans, quiet PSUs, good cases, water cooling, etc) -- they're just pricey.
And your post is also wrong in a way. A couple fans make so little of a difference over the total power consumption of the whole PC, like half a percent perhaps. Nothing to make any real difference. There's many other ways to reduce power consumption which actually make a real difference. Not to mention, you still need as many fans in the first place.
I thought that IBM would propose puting the leads on two outside edges of the chip and slapping a heatsink on the bottom. That would (almost) double the heat dissipation, too.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I like to use JB weld and I weld the CPU and heatsink together as one, that way ther is no gaps and the heat transfer is very high!
http://jbweld.net/products/jbweld.php
Do you really think that in 2 minutes with a razor blade that you can get a more uniform thickness than machinery which can be accurate to millionths of an inch?
I agree, I usually use 3000+ grain wet-dry automotive finishing sand paper. It works by increasing the available surface area, which increases thermal transfer. Though for most low-performance computers I build, I just use thermal tape as it's easier to clean up.
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
not being an electronics expert, I could not find a copy of the actual paper, but this url http://www.zurich.ibm.com/news/07/cooling.html actually gives some details, so people can actually shoot their mouths off knowing what it is that is being trashed.
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I hope every one realizes that this has nothing to do with the goop you put on before you snap your heatsink on. This is the thermal grease that goes on the die before they put the cap on processor.
Erm... You might not have noticed, but this technique is for the heat transfer between the CPU chip and the heat-spreader, NOT the heatsink bolted on later. This is inside the chip package, and underneath the metal plate you're thinking of as the CPU contact. You have no access to this interface, since it's sealed in the chip carrier. This interface uses a completely different compound as compared to the stuff you use to attach a heatsink, and the design they've come up with actually does work considerably better for this application, in addition to improving heat transfer, it also reduces application force, improving manufacturing yield, and therefore reducing cost.
I was expecting a new kind of package where you could cool both sides of the CPU die, instead of just one. That would obviously double the amount of heat transferred.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
What if you ever want to remove the processor. You can't remove the processor with the heat-sink still attached on my AMD system.
Not reading the article, but... It's not about between the head spreader and the heatsink!
It's about the chip and the heatspreader!
Ruffles make better ridged chips than IBM any day.
FTA: "Whether or not the AMDs or Intels of the world will buy in remains to be seen, but the potential is undeniable."
They aren't the only folks who use heat sinks. Come on, use your head!
buy some Indium. It's toxic though. It's what people use in no-shit situations though where you can't afford problems. Of course, you have to smush it a little harder than you typically do with CPU paste.
.. an anonymous coward already said it, but to make sure more people sees this, let me reiterate:
The first-generation Macbooks suffered from an overheating problem. On the quadrant where the CPU housing is located, the temperature would reach several degrees C higher than a comparable PC laptop (running the same CPU); there have been anecdotal tales of people disassembling their Macbooks, scraping off excess thermal paste and obtaining lower running temperatures.
The second-generation Macbooks are less affected, but I'm not sure if Apple's assembly manuals have changed or not, or whether it's a result of Merom outputting less heat on average than Yonah. The version that was out at the time of the first-gens apparently instructs the technician to use thermal paste too liberally.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Here's a thought, since you appear to be a fairly fluent 'modder' - ... well gold (which is pretty good.) I'd envision that if you got the lap right on both the CPU and the heatsink, you could do it as a single dry leaf (not as a paste) and give it a few minutes to settle in under pressure, turn on the CPU to heat things up a little until it seated in better (don't burn it in right away) and watch the CPU temps - I would be REAL interested in hearing how it went.
What if, after lapping both the heatsink and the CPU (to a mirror flat finish, or not, probably worth experimenting) instead of thermal paste you used gold leaf foil? Basically it is gold pounded ultra thin (in the 100 nanometer range, such that one square meter is made from 2 grams of gold), flat, would flex/bend to conform to the two surfaces and has the thermal transfer quality of
Try it with a system you are retiring anyways, see what kind of difference it made. Never know, since a piece of gold leaf isn't prohibitively expensive (a small piece would cost you less than a dollar, get a few pieces while you are dialing in the process.)
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I've seen so terribly dusted heat sinks that air wasn't flowing by at all..Pimp my PC folks excluded :))
The function governing thermal conduction is proportional to length. Therefore, if you can half the thickness of your paste layer, you double the thermal conductivity.
The way it works is that excess paste squishes into the microgrooves - instead of needing immense pressure to squish it all the way out to the edge (which won't happen). This means that the absolute minimum of paste should remain between the flat surfaces. If the grooves are relatively deep but narrow, you should get close to the minimum possible paste thickness (theoretically, you should only need enough paste to fill surface irregularities on the heat transfer surfaces between die and spreader). You still want the spaces between the grooves to be as flat as possible. You only sacrifice a small amount of surface area to the grooves, which is more than made up for by the decreased paste thickness.
Actually, gold's worse than silver for heat transfer. And copper.
I'm not sure how the heat conductivity of sterling silver would compare. Being 92.5% silver and 7.5% copper, linear interpolation suggests that it would be pretty good, but I'm not sure of the details. Perhaps alloys scatter phonons more.
That may be true, but gold isn't going to tarnish or corrode (both of which, I'm relatively certain, would fall well below gold in the heat transfer department).
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How to squeeze as much water as possible from under the tire.
:)
How to squeeze as much grease as possible from under the heatsink.
Hmmm... How long until I can get a BFG(oodrich) cooler for my Core 2?
I suppose most overclockers aren't Mechanical Engineers with a deep understanding of Heat Transfer. IBM obviously hired a few MEs to do the job.
3000 grit paper will polish that like glass. I thought they said rough it up a bit.
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Very true, but the issue I was getting at was that the thin layer of gold would be instead of the thermal grease, and would serve to create the 'gasket' between the CPU and heatsink, increasing (significantly, if my theory is right) the thermal transfer as the gold would have a much higher coefficient of thermal conductivity than even the best paste. The reason I suggested gold is that gold can easily be purchased in small quantities of gold foil, the gold foil is ~very~ flexible / malleable and would serve to fill in all the microscopic gaps between the CPU and heatsink creating a thermal bridge in the process (which is the purpose of the paste), thus making the cooling solution quite a bit more effective.
In theory.
Anybody want to try it, perhaps on some older hardware?
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Thermal conduction is a simple product of surface area. They didn't do anything magic except increase surface area. The whole thing would be a hell of alot more efficient if the core's surface had the same matching opposing pattern so that they interfaced and no thermal crap was necessary at all. Bet they didn't think of that! They were too busy patting themselves on the back for coming up with a solution that has been around forever, only they are doing it on a smaller scale apparently. I find it odd they didn't try the same solution on the thermal plate-heatsink interface, too. The same concept should work there, too.
Sounds like it would not work well:
3 10
"To be effective a TIM combines properties to minimize the total interface resistance. High conductivity (200-420 W/mC) materials, like copper, silver, aluminum and gold, maximize thermal conductivity, but do not flow into intimate contact because of the relative lack of compliance so the interface resistances are very high and the overall performance is poor."
http://www.indium.com/_dynamo/download.php?docid=
That means it'll be another 18 months before I can fry an egg on my CPU... That's ok, I can wait...
*taps foot*
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
This is highly suggestive that the engineers at IBM watch far too much porn.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Cool!
Are the pictures right? 5 millimeters? Shouldn't that be 5 micrometers?
I actually spent a considerable amount of my employer's money researching this particular question as it applied to other types of devices. (TECs, instead of CPUs, with big heat sinks on them.) After doing a lot of tests with different thermal interface materials, (different types of thermal grease, Arctic Silver 5 included,) we concluded that Arctic Silver 5 really was the best, but not by much. The best performances of Arctic Silver 5 were less than 10% better than the best performances of regular thermal grease (Thermagon 2500). The manner of application, however, did make a large difference. We tested the razor blade method, (using it like a spatula to apply a thin, even layer,) versus the blob in the middle, (and sometimes 4 small blobs near the corners,) methods. The blob methods won every time. Whomever mentioned that the air bubbles are difficult to get rid of is correct -- if one tries this experiment with two microscope slides so that one can see the grease pattern, it quickly becomes obvious that a patient attempt at causing a central blob to spread throughout the interface moving in one direction only, (outward,) produces the best results. It is also helpful to try the experiment with the slides to see exactly how long one has to apply consistent pressure and very small movements to get the material to spread over the whole interface evenly. (Hint: it's way longer than you might think -- best results were obtained by placing a weight on the heat sink and leaving it there overnight. I suppose the spring on a CPU heat sink would provide the same results if it is stiff enough.) With regard to the optimal amount required for the interface, the manufacturer's instructions were an excellent guide. The manufacturer's spec sheets usually indicate the mass of thermal interface material required for some area of interface with a specific interface thickness. Note that the interface thickness that one is able to achieve is limited ultimately by the flatness of the surfaces being mated by the thermal interface material. Patience in making the thermal material cover and then flow out the sides of the interface is also important. So, if you really want optimal performance, buy a heat sink with a CPU-contact side flatness that is very good. (Or find a way to polish it yourself using a granite table or some other extremely flat surface.) Use Arctic Silver 5, and *do* do the bit where the instructions tell you to rub the stuff on the heat sink and massage it around, wipe the excess off, then apply your blob to the CPU. My tests suggested that the pre-rubbing bit was not just extra work. I think this is probably because aluminium and copper both gain surface oxide layers very readily, so one is usually not contacting metal to CPU with thermal grease in between. (One is usually contacting very thin metal oxide layer to the heat source, and the oxide layer has much higher thermal impedance than the metal itself.) Arctic Silver 5 has nitride particles in it, whose presence in the mixture I can only imagine to be useful as a very very fine abrasive that is actually hard enough to remove aluminum oxide from heat sinks. And use the blob method of thermal material deposition. Practice with microscope slides first so you can get a feel for what is happening in the interface where you can't normally see it.
I just had a look at the pictures of the surface's structure. It looks as if it is capable of squeezing out all the air due to its crossed shapes. Thus the problem IBM must have had is that before it enclosed a lot of air. The valleys should conduct the air out during the mounting and thereby guarantee a minimum of how much air stays behind. The shape actually defines the spots where air can get enclosed whereas before - flat to flat - it could have been anywhere and with one or many bubbles. I am now too lazy to think of a formula to describe the benefit, but it should explain the 2x improvement.
I'm not an o/c modder. As a matter of fact, the last time I even built my own box was about 7 years ago, and now I just prefer to pay for whatever will do the job.
That said, this cooling stuff makes me curious since it is similar in a sense to engine cooling, something I still do frequently. (Well, maybe not the cooling part, but tinkering with the engine part.) It seems like we're still working with the same darn concepts even though our chips have gotten significantly faster, and thus hotter. Whether the CPU is air cooled or liquid cooled, we're still using a heatsink on TOP of the CPU, which sounds very inefficient to me, and is exactly why IBM (and others) are still working with thermal paste in the first place. Something drastically (or is it?) different seems to be in call for.
Take engines, for example. Passive (air) cooled engines exist, and they work pretty well, but it gets exponentially harder to cool something with air alone when the power (and heat) increases. Aircraft engines tend not to have as much of a problem, because the constant flight at high speed allows for quite a bit of air to travel over the fins, which are essentially heatsinks. For some (relatively lower powered) motorcycle engines, it works too, partly because they stop less frequently than cars (zipping through traffic, instead of sitting in a traffic jam) and are pretty much open to the environment, allowing for a good amount of air flow. Car engines used to be air cooled, but sitting in a mostly closed compartment with poor airflow ended up creating water cooled engines. Even the Porsche 911 has been water cooled since the 996.
However, there's a difference in water cooled engines, and water cooled CPUs. The main difference (as far as cooling is concerned) is that engine blocks themselves are cooled, whereas CPUs have a heatsink that is cooled. That means that whether it is air cooled or water cooled, the CPU still requires the same damn heatsink, and is still stuck with the thermal paste issue. Automotive engines have a layer of water flowing right around the cylinder itself, allowing for maximum levels of heat dissipation. Why can't CPUs have the same? That is, why not have the heatsink integrated as part of the CPU itself, rather than have a second piece bonded on top? Is it that hard? Or should I be kicking myself right now for not running to a patent attorney?
Chip technology has advanced a great bit, but again, the chip CASING hasn't really changed that much. Maybe a bit of work in this area needs to be addressed. Afterall, the CASE may actually be just as inefficient in heat transfer as the thermal pasted is. If the chip were mounted directy ON a heat conducting surface, and a gasket was placed around the edges of this surface, a "head" could be placed ontop, leaving an opening inside to allow liquid to flow. There will still be issues like speed of liquid flow (you won't want to blas the chip off the surface) and methods to keep the liquid purified (avoid corrosion), but it seems possible.
Sort of reminds me of the old Cray supercomputers that had their parts submerged in some kind of a liquid (nitrogen?) to cool them. Purified H2O would probably work as well in modern computers. Of course, I'm talking out of my ass since I know engines and not CPUs, and I know my engine won't breakdown just because I put a fingerprint on it!
if you look at the diagram in the article this is about the application of thermal paste between the chip & the spreader.
from the article
"IBM's find addresses how thermal paste is typically spread between the face of a chip and the heat spreader that sits directly over the core."
When you get to work, buy the old dude back in the machine shop a cup of coffee.
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He can teach you something.
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