Slashdot Mirror
PC's Waste Heat Could Add To Processing Power
Urchin writes to tell us that physicists working in a new field called "phononics" claim that waste heat from a processor could actually be used to add to its power. "Crunching data coded using photons — photonic computing — is one example, and in 2007 researchers built the first workable optical transistor. But now the idea of computing using heat flow is gaining popularity among applied physicists. Heat travels through solid materials by means of phonons — ripples of vibration passing through a series of atoms. Those ripples can be used to send and store data in digital form: one temperature is read as 0 or 'off' while a second, higher temperature is interpreted as 1 or 'on.' Provided that the thermal memory is well insulated, it can keep its temperature — and data — intact for a long time."
I might not entirely understand this, it sounds like this is a whole lot of work for not much result. What happens if you get temperatures that are precisely inbetween 0 and 1 values? What effect does the processor's fan and/or heatsink have on said values? Why bother?
Change the channel.
Interesting...kind of like a turbocharger for a CPU.
Lisa, In this house we obey the laws of thermal dynamics!
That said. It may save some power converting loss head back again making it more efficient.
But they way that most people use computers I don't know if there is a benefit. We rarely run at full CPU Heat kicking.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I wonder how long before this is used for something bad? Does this possibly mean that the sun, inhabited by an alien life form, has turned off the one's and zero's in an effort to relay the message GTFO!
FTFA:
Casati says practical physicists must rise to the challenge set by the theorists. Yet even if they can, phononic computing is unlikely to threaten electronics because phonons travel a lot slower than electrons. Li imagines that the two technologies will work together, in hybrid devices that perform some computation using waste heat.
I bet there are better ways to use this than PC computing
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I'm hooked on phononics. And quit making fun of my stuttutter!
"Provided that the thermal memory is well insulated", that basically means putting it on a different piece of silicon/on something else entirely, which kind of defeats the object as I see it.
While I haven't looked at this in great detail, it strikes me that achieving anything near useful density is going to very difficult due to entropy, and the simple fact that putting very small volumes at slightly different temperatures right next to each others quickly leads to a relatively uniform temperature distribution.
This sounds somewhat improbable/unfeasible to me...
There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face - Ben Williams
This, IMHO is an academic concept at best. State definition by thermal state has been done in research before but it is slow, and trying to collect the waste energy in the form of heat and re-use it as the byproduct in another state machine sounds a bit questionable.
Mechanical computers are viable as well, but not too terribly practical.
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
news and beano at 11
bogonics
Yes, temperature gradients are a form of information, but get real guys: they are the bottom of food chain of useful computing tech. A real computer dumps heat as a side-effect of doing useful work - its more efficient to try to recover the heat as energy than to directly use it to compute. Sure, if you have a steam locomotive, it makes sense to add secondary and even tertiary energy-extractors to increase locomotion, but that is a special case: the locomotive is isolated and has big energy needs - this is not the case for computers.
I have this picture in my head of a water-cooled PC that gets so hot that the water turns to steam, which runs a turbine, which helps power the PC.
Hugely inefficient, but sooooo cool to have a Steam-Powered PC.
heat to a certain point, the joint points melt, connecting two neighboring leads, and congratulations, you have a short... hooray for phononics transistor!
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
Who ordered that? And where do they fit in the standard model?
Phonons travel at the speed of sound in their medium, which is 100,000 times slower than the speed of electrical signals or light. If you've got a phononic circuit running at a Ghz clock rate, signals can only travel a few microns. This size limit severely restricts the number of individual components you can have in your circuit.
Go light, or go home.
Just use the heat to create more electricity to increase the efficiency. Thermal Acoustic Piezo Energy Conversion
Talk about slow... matter has this undesireable property of "thermal inertia". Your basic thermal wire is going to have a hard time making very many transitions per second. We're talking centihertz.
They'll have to speed up Vista by a factor of several gazillion to run well on this CPU.
Lisa, In this house we obey the laws of thermal dynamics!
Yeah, except nothing proposed here would contradict the laws of thermodynamics (not thermal dynamics, by the way). You and your joke failed. So sorry.
This is how the outer layers of a Matrioshka Brain would work, perhaps?
So conceivably, you could have patterns of heat moving through a large mountain, or a lake, or a large gas field in space, constituting a conscious intelligence.... hrm.
meh
AMD stock jumped suddenly today.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Thermos porn...I can't wait!
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
What if the universe is just binary code.
The net gain in computing power would be negative, simply because everyone knows that heat causes computrons to decay into bogons, resulting in an overall loss of processing power.
This is a joke, isn't in?
I didn't realize PC's produced dung, let alone that this dung produced much heat! I've seen my PC goto shit, though.
Caller: Hi, my computer keeps getting these blue screens.
Tech: Have you recently installed new software or hardware?
Caller: No, it just randomly started getting blue screens.
Tech: Have you had any power outages lately?
Caller: No, everything has been fine up until now.
Tech: Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Caller: Yes, I even turned off my printer and my heat lamp and speakers and all the other stuff plugged in here.
Tech: Sir, I'd recommend you turn off all the lights in your room while you use your computer. Remember, your skin must be perfectly pale as to guarantee that your computer is not being exposed to any external light or heat.
If I understand this properly (and it's not 100% guaranteed that I do), this sounds like an excessively complicated solution that would yield relatively little benefit. The "sandwich" idea from TFA sounds especially counterproductive, if external power is required to keep the hot side hit & the cold side cold.
Instead of trying to harness waste heat to eke out a fraction of a percent of extra processing power, here's an idea: how about sucking that waste heat into a small insulated pipe with a low-voltage van, and running that pipe down to my feet? It's very cold near the floor of my apartment, and some warm air aimed at my tootsies would be greatly appreciated while I use my computer.
Maybe this pipe could have a little door I could close in the summer, when the additional warmth would be less welcome.
Just once I'd like someone to call me 'Sir' without adding 'You're making a scene.'
I hope they are not too worried about interfacing to either quantum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing, photonic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photonic_computer, or spintronic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spintronics circuits. The thermal 1's and 0's would cause immediate decoherence in the other computational circuits, and they have much more potential bandwidth than any thermal type circuit will ever have. Quantum computers will beat the pants off of any thermal flow logic, providing that the problem at hand permits it. The spintronics or photonic solutions would not create all that heat in the first place so there would be no point to adding the "extra" thermal circuits. Just what is it actually solving? This sounds like a solution that is looking for a 'future problem' to solve, because it likely won't be a real tangible product before the others technologies already are, and even then it won't beat out it's competition in raw performance.
Seems like a solid state thermocouple might be easier to use. I'd like to see some sort of heat pipe from the case to one, then use that output to power the screen (maybe not the main one but a smaller backup little screen??). I have no idea of the state of the art there though or what sort of useful electricity you might get from one. I have seen a kerosene lantern from Russia that uses a thermocouple to scavenge waste heat from the kero burning to provide power for a table radio.
As long as they don't mess with the seventh phonon there should be no problem. But if they end up creating a hyper resonance...end of the world, man.
(Will anybody get this reference?)
In the winter time (and where I am, it's damned cold out during the winter...snow banks are over my head right now), I have to shut off the heat vent in my office.
The heat thrown my all the machines in here, one main dev box, 1 laptop and 3 small appliance servers, plus all the peripherals keep the office nicely heated all winter.
So...what waste heat...I use mine, thanks!
Chaeron Corporation
Why does a CPU emit heat when X instructions are made? Is there a reason, or perhaps a physical law that requires X quanta of heat per Information instruction?
I read elsewhere that the waste heat is the result of doing irreversible math on the CPU, and the thrown away information convert to heat. And I saw people working on CPUs that are reversible, which could recover the energy back out of them (minus negligible running costs).
Is that just pie in the sky academic research, or a viable path for CPUs to eventually go?
To be fair, VTEC does allow for a milder cam profile at lower rpms, while allowing for a much more aggressive cam profile for additional horsepower at higher rpms. Maybe that's what the OP was getting at.
Its winter. There is no such thing as 'waste heat'. Every watt emitted by a computer is a watt that doesn't have to be emitted by the heater.
So how long until we have fart powered computers? This fart is really strong so it's a "one". That fart, not so bad, it's a "zero". Of course you have to keep each fart insulated well so they last a long time.
...phononics proposes transmitting data as heat (thermal 'waves', whatever). So the heat generated by losses in various circuits on the chip would be noise to the data phonons we want.
This is analogous to signal to noise problems in electronic systems. And the solution in the electronic world, reducing the noise, means that we've got to be even more concerned about reducing the heat due to losses in a phononic chip.
Have gnu, will travel.
He he, I know how to melt your processor: 11111111111111111...
Table-ized A.I.
Heat from our body could activate led's in clothing. We could be a walking strobe light, forget auras!
Is it April,1? ;-)
You can use it to break crypto!
http://eprint.iacr.org/2009/002
and you'll have vapourware!
this is my sig, there are many like it, but this one is mine.
Alternatively, you could just attach a Stirling engine to your heatsink and generate some lovely electricity instead.
I just want to acknowledge and validate your Arch Deluxe reference.