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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?
Interesting...kind of like a turbocharger for a CPU.
Phonons are just a very weird state of photons, for suitably high values of "very weird"--they propagate by the dipole interactions of the substrate, and are thus at the bottom an EM phenomena. But that isn't a very useful way to look at them (about as useful as saying that sound in air involves oscillatory motion of masses and thus could be considered a source of gravity waves).
Rather than asking "how do they fit into the standard model?" it makes more sense to ask "how tight is the analogy between phonons in a lattice and photons in a vacuum?" and "where does the analogy break down?" Note also that the analogy is pretty good in places (the governing equations are identical) so the concept is more useful than you think.
--MarkusQ
P.S. IANALP -- I am not a licensed physicist; I am not your physicist, and this is not physical advice. If you have questions about the laws of nature you should conduct experiments, not rely on the advice of people you meet on the internet.
Also, fans in a water-cooled system?
Yes, fans in a water-cooled system. You need fans on the radiators to extract the waste heat from the water. You can do it passively but that's massively inefficient. There are really two reasons to go with water cooling on a PC. You can do it to give yourself a bit more overhead in the overclocking department (since you can move a bit more heat using water and massive radiators, versus a individual heatsinks and fans), or you can do it for a silent system in which case you often need to under-clock the system and rely on convection either to cool the radiator, to circulate the water, or both. My gaming system is water cooled and overclocked and has 8 120mm fans, 6 on the radiators and 2 on the front intake grill (one of the radiators is setup as an intake as well, so it's actually 5 intakes, 3 exhaust).
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Quick, someone tell the physicits! I'm sure they forgot all about this.
More like someone tell the journalists (the people who actually WROTE this article). It happens all the time that a scientist says something offhand like "and you could use this for processing power", and a journalist misinterprets this to mean that it's both feasible, and commercially viable.
AccountKiller
The southern hemisphere says hi! We're still in the middle of an intense heatwave where the temperature inside is 304.5K.