Sandia's Floating, Dust-Free, Spinning Heatsink

An anonymous reader writes "Sandia Research Laboratory believes it has come up with a much more efficient solution than heatsink-fan cooling a CPU that simply combines the heatsink and fan components into a single unit. What you effectively get is a spinning heatsink. The new design is called the Sandia Cooler. It spins at just 2,000 RPM and sits a thousandth of an inch above the processor. Sandia claim this setup is extremely efficient at drawing heat away from the chip, in the order of 30x more efficient than your typical heatsink-fan setup. The Sandia Cooler works by using a hydrodynamic air bearing. What that means is when it spins up the cooler actually becomes self supporting and floats above the chip (hence the thousandth of an inch clearance). Cool air is drawn down the center of the cooler and then ejected at the edges of the fins taking the heat with it. And as the whole unit spins, you aren't going to get dust build up (ever)."

Comments

Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

It spins at just 2,000 RPM and sits a thousandth of an inch above the processor

What could possibly go wrong? Seems like a pretty tight tolerance with all the vibration that could occur in a server room.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[AngryDeuce]

I know, right? And when it loses power for one reason or another, does it just fall onto the top of the bare CPU it 'floats' above as it spins down? Boy, that sounds healthy for a CPU...

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[K. S. Kyosuke]

You must be a hard drive hater.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually read the article, the spinning heatsink is attached to a base plate. It DOES NOT sit directly on a CPU die.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[AngryDeuce]

There's an article?!

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[edibobb]

And my PC will have dust plugging that .001 inch.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you call a thousandth of an inch? A "milliinch?"

I thought an inch was divided by 2's powers. So shouldn't that be a 1,024th of an inch?

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[cheekyjohnson]

Yeah, but only nerds read articles!

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[localman57]

So are you implying that the editors aren't nerds?

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[localman57]

A "mil".

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Volante3192]

When a spinny HD shuts down, the head moves off the platter first at least.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a video too. It has 45 likes and 117 dislikes. Apparently Sandia sucks at making videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGpV_VPUn8g&feature=youtu.be

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[msauve]

It's OK. Not even the editor read the article, or they would have seen it was from 9 months ago.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

That wasn't always the case.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

from the looks of it (pics only) at a 1000th of an inch it will end up in contact with the CPU die eventually (for example the base plate will get out of tolerance in relation to the cpu and where does it bolt to that will be vibration free to these high tolerances - the motherboard?) - ur also going to get dust in between the 'blades' of the spinning heat sink from the looks of it.

Hope it works but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[ackthpt]

It spins at just 2,000 RPM and sits a thousandth of an inch above the processor

What could possibly go wrong? Seems like a pretty tight tolerance with all the vibration that could occur in a server room.

Read up a little on the science of Hard Disc Drives - heads usually rode on air, just above the platter surface. Same effect could be employed here.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[jlar]

From TFA it is clear that the spinning heatsink has a hole in the middle and that it is actually this hole which is situated over the CPU while the surrounding part of the cooler rests on a structure made for that. So the spinning heatsink will never touch the CPU.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a better idea: just spin the motherboard 'round and 'round -- not only will my patent-pending idea cool the CPU it will cool everything else too!

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[ackthpt]

And my PC will have dust plugging that .001 inch.

That's my problem .. I built my PC in a not-at-all clean room and it runs there. Dust rhinos abound.

But if you're Sandia, you probably have air filters, bunny suits, everything to ensure the dust remains far from your spinning heatsink. Because, unlike you and I, Sandia have money.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

I just read slashdot for the pictures.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[sjames]

Why would it be a problem? The cooler consists of the spinning part resting on a heat spreader plate (it floats just off of the plate when spinning). The plate sits on a standard thermal transfer pad which sits on the CPU. Where are you seeing a problem that every other cpu fan in the known universe doesn't have?

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[skids]

No no no, you have to work a factor of 3 in there to be truly english.

So try 1/12/12/8 == 1/1152. And call it an eighth-undergross just to be cretinous.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[RogL]

Ask someone who's worked in a USA machine-shop: it's called a thousandth (the "of an inch" part is implied).
Machinists are not programmers, so beyond about 1/64" they switch to thousandths.
Below that, tenths (ten-thousandths of an inch).
Below that, millionths.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[wintercolby]

I thought I was reading "news for nerds".

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called a mil, and it's extremely common in American machine shops.

The imperial unit system, when dealing with things that actually matter (large forces, tight tolerances, etc.), is decimalized just like metric. We use 1/1000s of an inch, force increments of 1000 lbf, etc. etc. The system may be archaic, but it's not retarded.

As for OP's question about the tolerances being too tight, 1 mil is a standard tolerance (IT Grade 6) for shaft fits on the order of 5 inches in diameter (source; Shigley's Mechanical Design). On smaller shafts, that 1 mil becomes decidedly more loose. I don't know how big these chips are; I don't work with chips. But guesstimating from that photo, I'd put 1 mil for something like this as not only perfectly safe for vibration, but easy and cost-effective to manufacture too..

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[wierd_w]

There will also be microscopic particle buildup inside the air bearing itself, because it isn't a sealed unit.

The surfaces of the heatsink and the CPU are not perfectly smooth, which means tiny eddy currents will form on the surfaces, and trap these particles. This means the heatsink will still require periodic cleaning and inspection in any environment besides an electrostatic cleanroom.

A thousandth of an inch is very huge compared to dust particles.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

I watched this video so I could see an overview of the Sandia Cooler,
and all I got was a video about how other people were able to see an overview of the Sandia Cooler.
MadComputerScientist 4 months ago 116

Wow Sandia you suck at making videos.
willtrip711 4 days ago 69

At about 3:45 into the video, you do get to see it in action for about 2 seconds before the video goes back to people talking about the press releases of the patent application or some drivel like that (I had it muted).

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[mcgrew]

I read the article, but didn't bother to look at the date. But even though TFA is nine months old, it was news to me.

Shouldn't this tech be born by now?

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[beelsebob]

Actually, it relies on the same aero effects that hard disks do to float their drive head above the disk, so it's pretty well known stuff.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Gr8Apes]

I read the article, but didn't bother to look at the date. But even though TFA is nine months old, it was news to me.

Shouldn't this tech be born by now?

Apparently I was out the day it was posted as well. Perhaps it's not as good as Sandia originally claimed, or a lot more expensive to point of not being economically feasible?

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[AikonMGB]

I prefer a "thou"; less ambiguous than "mil", which could be confused for "millimeter" (granted, one should not be shortening millimeter to mil).

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[rrohbeck]

Decimal or binary thousandths, i.e. 1/1024? Since you started with 1/64...

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[fustakrakich]

Actually it was almost a year ago. Consider it a dupe

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

Decimal or binary thousandths, i.e. 1/1024? Since you started with 1/64...

I...I don't...Seriously?? And people modded you up for this?

This is the real world, not a programming language. If you ask for something in binary, you will be thrown out of a machine shop on your ass. People who work with dangerous machinery don't appreciate jokesters.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be so surprised. Most sentences have articles in them.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[rrohbeck]

Sorry, just asking as a European who grew up with only powers of 10 and doesn't understand those weird English units.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[DrVomact]

I prefer a "thou"; less ambiguous than "mil", which could be confused for "millimeter" (granted, one should not be shortening millimeter to mil).

I can attest to that confusion. Having been born in a country that uses the metric system, I kept thinking that "mil" must be some kind of slang for "millimeter". (Needless to say, I am not a hardware engineer.) One day, I was touring a chip manufacturing plant, and the "engineer" giving the tour kept referring to "mils". It soon became apparent to me that the unit in question must be much smaller than a millimeter. So I finally burst out with my question, "What's a mil?". He just stared at me blankly, presumably struck speechless by my ignorance. I suggest that this is how we managed to put a very expensive and blurry space telescope into orbit.

I've gotten used to the common usages of the English system; at this point, I'd be inconvenienced by a sudden switch to kilometers (and experience shows that the US public won't accept the change). However, you'd think that U.S. and British engineers could nerve themselves to overcome a switch to metric.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[citizenr]

It spins at just 2,000 RPM and sits a thousandth of an inch above the processor

What could possibly go wrong? Seems like a pretty tight tolerance with all the vibration that could occur in a server room.

Read up a little on the science of Hard Disc Drives - heads usually rode on air, just above the platter surface. Same effect could be employed here.

Guess what happens when you kick a hard drive.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it looks like a typical USDoE press release video to me. Look for video from the DoE and all the National Laboratory YouTube channels, and you'll see that they all "suck at making videos"

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[AikonMGB]

I suggest that this is how we managed to put a very expensive and blurry space telescope into orbit.

Not in this case; there was an extra washer installed on one side of the arm mount for the mirror grinder, meaning that the arm was skewed. I agree with your general sentiment of reducing areas of potential confusion, though.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[mcavic]

I was about to say that surfing YouTube via https is a little paranoid, but actually, maybe I should start doing that.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you. A "mil" is 10 kilometers in swedish, and we use it daily.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

Install this: https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Eight_gross_infractions

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[gl4ss]

when we were kids we had to run park.com before turning the computer off to move the head off the platters and we were happy for it!

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Coren22]

Does it yelp like when you kick a dog?

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Jarik C-Bol]

that's ok, there is video also! no nerd cred needed!

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

Not until fairly recently actually.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

Decimal thousandths.

Fraction often work out to powers of two though...
1/2 followed by 1/4 and 3/4 followed by 1/8, 3/8, 5/8, and 7/8

You can see the pattern. Double the denominator and use all the odd numbers that are smaller gives you all the un-reducible fractions.
(that is probably a terrible explanation but it's how I think of it in my head)

1/64 is typically the smallest distance that can be measured before using a micrometer or caliper, and those usually measure in the thousandths.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

However, you'd think that U.S. and British engineers could nerve themselves to overcome a switch to metric.

We did. Decades ago.
IAABE.
Wait, you did mean we ought to switch to metric, didn't you? No offence but that sentence is pretty damn hard to make sense of.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[QuasiSteve]

Interesting... in electronics design, the 'mil' is a common unit of measure. E.g. a trace might be 6 mils wide. A 'mil' is 1/1000th of an inch. Checking wikipedia, it seems some call it a 'thou' - can't say I have encountered that.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and a 1/1000th of a mil is a microinch.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Khyber]

We tried this tech when it came out a couple of years ago. Horrible for LED modules of any real power. (100+W)

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[SuricouRaven]

I took hard drives apart just to figure out how the automatic park works. As best I can figure out, it's powered by the residual momentum of the drive as it spins down. Implicit flywheel energy storage.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[ackthpt]

It spins at just 2,000 RPM and sits a thousandth of an inch above the processor

What could possibly go wrong? Seems like a pretty tight tolerance with all the vibration that could occur in a server room.

Read up a little on the science of Hard Disc Drives - heads usually rode on air, just above the platter surface. Same effect could be employed here.

Guess what happens when you kick a hard drive.

Your game is over.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[SuricouRaven]

Even the English don't use those weird English units any more, with a few very specific exceptions (Vehicle speed, people-weight, beer)

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[ngg]

I would suggest that one of the major reasons that US still uses Standard measurements in engineering has to do with "network effects" that date to the two world wars. During the second world war, European factories were heavily bombed and after the war they needed to be re-tooled. In contrast, American industry tooled up for the war, (using standard measurements) but was never bombed, leaving a surplus of high quality tools, many of which are still serviceable to this day. When you are making a new mill or lathe, it doesn't really matter whether it is calibrated in standard or metric, but re-calibrating an existing machine for a different system of units is very costly.

On a typical manual mill, for example, turning the traverse handwheel a complete revolution moves the table by an integer number of thousandths of an inch (usually 100 or 200, which are 2.54 and 5.08 mm). To operate the mill in metric units requires either that the operator remember that a revolution is 2540 micrometers (awkward) or rebuild a significant precision part of the machine (the leadscrews and leadscrew nuts). You might think that this wouldn't be a problem with CNC mills, but many use stepper motors to turn the leadscrews. Those stepper motors might have only 200 or 400 steps per revolution (giving a resolution of 1 to 0.25 mils, or 0.0254 mm to 0.00635 mm) which can make it inconvenient to use metric units.

If that weren't bad enough, collets (basically an adapter to hold the "bit" in the mill) come in standard sizes to hold mills (what you call a mill "bit" used on a milling machine. yes, it is confusing) of standard sizes, which are typically fractions of an inch on US equipment. When you are machining a piece of metal, the finite diameter of the mill it usually important. The accessories that go with a milling machine can easily add up to more than the cost of the machine itself. So, to really operate a mill in metric units in a convenient way, you'd also need re-purchase all the little parts that go with the mill.

Someone is probably going to reply that these issues don't apply to modern CNC tools. I'm not familiar with those, but the point is that there are a significant number inexpensive and serviceable tools in the US that can only work with metric units in a very awkward way (or at great expense).

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[otuz]

Yes, and a hint to the kids: park.com wasn't a website.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[reboot246]

Apparently Sandia sucks at making videos.

Amen! The video where the guy is demonstrating how quiet the device runs is ruined by the crappy background music that never quits.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[rs79]

Yeah but is .exe a great idea for a tld or what?

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Dishevel]

Because, unlike you and I, Sandia have money.

It is our money that they have.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[rs79]

"Read up a little on the science of Hard Disc Drives - heads usually rode on air, just above the platter surface. Same effect could be employed here."

They're sealed though, and you can only open them up in a clean room. Guess what happens if a hair gets between the heads and the platter? You get this cool tinkle tinkle noise, but not for long and the it stops working.

Air bearings aren't new by any stretch. If computers had filtered air (not that hard, you can buy filters off flea bay that replace a drive bay panel) and the the computer is never moved or hit then maybe. But with computers sucking cat hairs, let alone 2 foot log human hair... well, I dunno.

Put 100 of them in the worst places imaginable and compare the death rates to conventional fans. Then we'll see if practice is different from theory.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[rrohbeck]

Haha. That reminds me of a corporate trip to Ireland. The hotel had a cooperation with a health club and they offered a complimentary health exam so I tried it. When the trainer asked my weight, I told him "85 kilos." "Uh, how many stones?" "What's a stone?"
We had to look it up on the Intarwebz.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean, Sandia has our money, as they are subsidized.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

It kind of reminds me of a Van de Graaff generator. What could go wrong, indeed.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[t4ng*]

Yup. I laughed when I read this part...

And as the whole unit spins, you aren't going to get dust build up (ever).

I've got a bunch of old, dead fans I'd love to show them...if they could see them through all the caked on dust and dirt!

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

And some of the "English" units used in the US are actually different to the "Imperial" measurements with the same names. The US fluid ounce is about 4% bigger than the Imperial one, yet you only put 16 of them in a pint, while we use 20 giving us larger pints and gallons.

Can't we all just use metric and be done with it?

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[DrVomact]

I suggest that this is how we managed to put a very expensive and blurry space telescope into orbit.

Not in this case; there was an extra washer installed on one side of the arm mount for the mirror grinder, meaning that the arm was skewed. I agree with your general sentiment of reducing areas of potential confusion, though.

You appear to be correct; I can't find anything about the Hubble error being due to metric/English unit confusion. I don't know where I got this idea. Thanks for the correction.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you are thinking of Mars Climate Orbiter?

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[hairyfeet]

As i'm sure you've read it doesn't actually just spin on top of the CPU but on a baseplate, and I doubt it would just "drop" but rather just float down as the RPMs slowed.

My questions would be thus: How much will it cost, and how does it compare to heatpipes? Because as it is now you can slap something like a Hyper N520 into even your average midtower and frankly get pretty insane cooling for like $30. I have one on top of an AMD Thuban Hexa and it idles between 95f and 105f and under full load, just slamming the living hell out of the CPU, I can barely get the thing up to 124f. So while I can see a market for the server rack how does its cooling stack up to the modern heatpipe units and more importantly how high are they gonna be?

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[DrVomact]

...On a typical manual mill, for example, turning the traverse handwheel a complete revolution moves the table by an integer number of thousandths of an inch (usually 100 or 200, which are 2.54 and 5.08 mm). To operate the mill in metric units requires either that the operator remember that a revolution is 2540 micrometers (awkward) or rebuild a significant precision part of the machine (the leadscrews and leadscrew nuts). You might think that this wouldn't be a problem with CNC mills, but many use stepper motors to turn the leadscrews. Those stepper motors might have only 200 or 400 steps per revolution (giving a resolution of 1 to 0.25 mils, or 0.0254 mm to 0.00635 mm) which can make it inconvenient to use metric units...

Someone is probably going to reply that these issues don't apply to modern CNC tools. I'm not familiar with those, but the point is that there are a significant number inexpensive and serviceable tools in the US that can only work with metric units in a very awkward way (or at great expense).

You raise some excellent points. One tends to think of switching from English to Metric units as simply converting to a different way of thinking, but—as you cogently point out—there are more concrete reasons for resisting the move to metric. I wonder: does the reliance on English units tangibly reduce the competitiveness of US manufacturing vis a vis the rest of the world? If such a monetary disadvantage existed, then we might have a counter-argument, one that would tend to justify investment in new metric machinery. Given that such equipment is very expensive, I imagine that the disadvantages of the English system would have to be shown to be quite massive to justify the switch.

Also, I wonder if radically new manufacturing techniques might not displace the old machinery soon, thus vitiating the question of whether to replace our machining tools. If we start using 3-D printers to make everything, I do hope they won't have gears that will only move in increments of English units!

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[cffrost]

We tried this tech when it came out a couple of years ago. Horrible for LED modules of any real power. (100+W)

Where or how did you acquire the hardware? Are there COTS implementations available, and if so, can you please post a link?

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[garyebickford]

Ahh, the good old days - 12 inch 10 MB hard drives, and if you forgot to 'park' the head before shutdown, bad things would happen. And before that, the 'washing machine' Winchester - 5 HP stepping motors to move the heads, the drive could walk across the floor if the heads moved back and forth in resonance. And the IBM 1130, whose 1 MB 14 inch(?) removable drive had a one second mean seek time. ... I know I had a lawn somewhere. Now where did I put it?

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[garyebickford]

When we start populating space, I'm going to lobby for creation of an entirely new system of units, not based on any Earth measure (the meter was originally based on something like the distance from the equator to the pole - just as silly as the length of the king's foot!) And it will be completely incompatible with any of those ancient measures the groundlubbers depended on. I think we'll start with a certain round number of wavelengths of a particular frequency of light in free space - like the frequency of a particular electron transition of cesium. The time it takes for this many wavelengths to pass a certain point would be the fundamental time unit. And it will all be in either base 12 or 16 - none of this foolish base-10 nonsense.

Mass - that's already a problem. I propose basing mass on a physical reaction involving a Bose-Einstein condensate containing precisely 1000 atoms - perhaps based on a relative measure of repulsion or attraction for two different size condensates. Ideally, it would be something that can only be measured outside of significant localized gravitational fields - just to make it difficult for non-Spacers.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[cffrost]

Lose the carpet (preferably), and get a HEPA air cleaner (and/or electrostatic precipitator, if you don't mind minor ozone generation); they're not very expensive. If you have forced-air central heating, supplement with a 3M Filtrete furnace intake filter (top-rated in the June issue of Consumer Reports; HEPA/EP air cleaners also reviewed in that issue).

No more ghost farts. Your lungs and (sentient) machines will thank you.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[EdIII]

Guess what happens when you kick a hard drive.

Yes, but let's be honest. When you kick a hard drive do you really give a shit if it is going to continue pissing you off?

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[dillee1]

Try this one instead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWQZNXEKkaU BTW this link is actually embedded in the 2nd article link.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

You suddenly appear even more stupid than you did before kicking the hard drive?

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[trout007]

I'm a Mechanical Engineer that works in a Machine Shop. 1/1000 of an inch is usually called one thousandth or one mil. I say one thousandth. On drawings it is written .001. There is actually a whole system of tolerancing mechanical drawings ASME Y14.5. You don't just put a tolerance on a dimension but also how it relates to other features.

In this case the critical dimension would be a flatness tolerance on both parts and would be less than .001.

This isn't a difficult tolerance to meet but it would require some care and post machining inspection to verify. As for making SI parts on English machines it isn't too difficult if you have CNC machines. Most modern CAD software keeps track of units so if I have an SI model the program that writes the tool paths for my English CNC mill does all the conversions. The only extra equipment you usually need are the drills and taps for making threaded holes.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[KittenJuicer]

With all these talks of dust bunnies maybe we should measure things in millifurlongs

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot about holding the button down to charge the capacitor to *kick* the motor into action... :)

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[cheesybagel]

The rotating heat sink of death seems ok to me. Now can we get a working fusion reactor Sandia?

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[n3r0.m4dski11z]

"I would suggest that one of the major reasons that US still uses Standard measurements in engineering has to do with "network effects" that date to the two world wars. During the second world war, European factories were heavily bombed and after the war they needed to be re-tooled. In contrast, American industry tooled up for the war, (using standard measurements) but was never bombed, leaving a surplus of high quality tools, many of which are still serviceable to this day"

Canada changed to metric in the 70s. This was well after world war 1 and 2. Canadian industry was not bombed during either war.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[LurkerXXX]

REAL editors are nerds. Absolutely no one on the /. staff is deserving of the title Editor. CutNPasteWithoutReading Monkey is the title they actually deserve.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

Hear! Hear!

ANYONE who has opened up a PC with spinning fan blades knows that even the fscking BLADES catch the dust, debris, and dander floating everywhere. Unless the Sandia design includes a HEPA filter, then it's back to the drawing board.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[otuz]

Could be, so is .app
I'm pretty sure both are amongst the requests for new TLD's.
There will be a time, when all TLD's shorter than 5 letters are taken by domain squatters, if not by others.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd probably be surprised.

I think the quality of the posts would be much improved if they fixed the story submission form. It's pretty badly broken, but the editors have always done quite a bit to clean up any story I've submitted before it goes live. They'll try to shorten the headlines (which often needs doing), tinker with the summary to make it easier to read, put the source links inside the summary text where they think it makes sense, etc.

Junk slips through, but they have to sift through a lot of garbage and clean up even the stuff that does make it through.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[jaymemaurice]

Canada changed to metric in the 70s. This was well after world war 1 and 2. Canadian industry was not bombed during either war.

It just slowly left.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[jaymemaurice]

I would have thought modern instruments created for prescision needed for scientific and engineering applications would now use metric by default.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

Bollocs, we hadn't free Internet back then, and park.com was blocked by AOL.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[JRHelgeson]

Wrong video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWQZNXEKkaU
This is the video that has the dirt on the cooler...

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Rockoon]

Having worked as a machinist (CnC and manual), I can very well attest to this. However we used "thou" instead of "thousandths" as the term for the primary unit. Most of the carbide cutting tools that we produced for Pratt and Whitney had tolerances of +/- 1 tenths (1 tenth of a thou.)

I havent been in that business for almost 2 decades now, tho. The wiki article seems to indicate that "thou(sandths)" has become even more common in machinist vernacular.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

The spinning heatsink is going to drag that dust around and polish the cpu heat spreader.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[jaymemaurice]

Metric is bassed on water at 1N - this applies in space too, where water is expeiencing gravity of force of one neuton and 101.325 kPa. A cubic meter of water of water is ~1000kg - 1ml = 1g and 1cubic cm (assuming the water is ~4 degrese celcius). A meter is 100centi meters or 10decameters. On earth, water boils at ~100 celcius and freezes at about 0. As for mass calculations, they are simple even in space. All the "on earth" varibles are known... but make for trivial understanding and comparison based on something we all need to survive and can trivially obtain*

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[jaymemaurice]

The problem with you system is it does not allow easy comparrison between mass and volume and requires knowledge and measuring tools the average public doesn't have.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Khyber]

We asked for a sample to test out how well it would work on a 100w micro-array. Took us 4 months and a couple thousand dollars to get one. No COTS implementations available. We had better luck putting the array on a wedge of metal and rotating the entire assembly.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Inda]

Nice post.

I would suggest that using the handwheels for precision is a big no-no though. We liked our magnetic vernier measuring thingies for a reason. :)

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Inda]

Ask someone who's worked in an English machine shop: it's called a "thou" :)

"mil" is short for millimetre. e.g. I'd like that part machined to 2.56 mil.

No one spoke in fractions, feet, yards, or furlongs, only inches.

Get off my metric lawn.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[garyebickford]

All those measures are based on the meter, which is some fraction of the earth's diameter or some such foolishness. :) Plus, of course, the number of digits on one's hand, which makes no sense. Either a pure binary system (used as hexadecimal), or base 12, which has many more opportunities for fractions, would be better. And I'm sure I could come up with a better measure than Celcius - I recently read an interesting analysis of why Fahrenheit had its own pretty good justifications but I don't recall what they were.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[garyebickford]

requires knowledge and measuring tools the average public doesn't have.

Well, that's the point, isn't it? :D

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[virgnarus]

... I know I had a lawn somewhere. Now where did I put it?

Why don't you ask those loitering kids over there?

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[LongearedBat]

Lab technicians in bunny suits...?

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad we don't need that website anymore!

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

A friend told me about a instruction film on how to mount the big old drives, that had standing platters, to the floor properly. (This was crucial because you didn't want to be close when the bearings seized.) I've searched on youtube, but no luck.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

Please for the love of clarity use brackets!

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[dysan27]

Most of that dust is probobly on the stationary part of the fans. The main idea for this heatsink is that the HEATSINK doesn't get as much dust on it. Take a look at most fans they get some dust on the blades, but it doesn't really build up over time, as compared to the dust that accumulates on the stationary fins of a standard heatsink.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[Anonymous Coward]

Sandia engineers had this problem before. In response, they invented the clean room.

http://www.sandia.gov/LabNews/LN02-04-05/willis.pdf

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[t4ng*]

I live in an area that is at high altitude, with very dry air, and there is a lot of dust and dirt in the air (not all devices that need fans get to live in a clean room). In such an environment, a spinning fan blade creates it's own static charge which helps bond dust to the blades. I regularly see fan blades with such a thick layer of dust caked on them that you can not see the color of the fan blade material any more.

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[t4ng*]

Come to think of it... Sandia is in a high altitude, dry, dusty area!

Re:Thousandth of an inch

[jaymemaurice]

Oh upon review of the data available, I have concluded the initial readings from the sarcasm meter were mistaken...

Contrarian thinking

[dtmos]

I'm reminded of the rotary engine, used in some WWI aircraft. The crankshaft was stationary -- attached to the plane's firewall -- and the entire engine block, including the cylinders, rotated around it. (The propeller was attached to the engine block.) In this way, no flywheel was necessary (the block was its own flywheel), saving weight, and the engine was cooled naturally, by the air flow over the moving cylinders. I don't know how the engines were balanced.

In a similar manner, the Sandia Cooler moves the heatsink through the air, rather than the air through the heatsink. It's solving a different problem, but I've always been fond of contrarian thinking like this.

Re:Contrarian thinking

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The main idea was not to save the flywheel weight, but to cool the engine when the aircraft is not moving. These air cooled engines have fins on the engine block to radiate the heat away. At flight speeds at high altitude cooling is not an issue. But sitting on the runway, idling, these engine blocks would melt. So they decided to spin the cylinders instead of the crank shaft.

But such a heavy rotating mass makes for very unusual handling. When a small force is applied to a spinning disk in one direction a very large reaction happens in the mutually perpendicular third direction. Some fighter pilots would use it to make very very tight left turns, (or a right turn depending on the spin). Sometimes they would use two banks of cylinders counter rotating. Or two engines counter rotating to balance the angular momentum.

Re:Contrarian thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not keep the fans still and instead rotate the cpu ? Spinning the whole computer at 2000 rpm would also help with ventilation...

Re:Contrarian thinking

[Lumpy]

so the air coming from the giant fan mounted in front of it was not enough to cool it?

Re:Contrarian thinking

[Dr_Barnowl]

The point of the propeller is to push the air away from the aircraft, not into it.

Re:Contrarian thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

Be careful of terms like "naturally" -- like, do you mean to imply there is "un-natural" cooling? It was simply 'air-cooled', just like later radial engines, or many motorcycle and scooter engines. The idea was partly to get flywheel effect without adding a flywheel, and also to get an air-cooled engine that would be cooled while the plane was stationary. Neat idea, but it comes with other compromises.

I don't know how the engines were balanced.

Like any other spinning chunk of metal.

It's solving a different problem, but I've always been fond of contrarian thinking like this.

Er, it wasn't exactly "contratian" (or rather 'unconventional'). This was the very early days for IC engines, with little convention to be un- against. We were just figuring out carburettors, for instance. Langley's Aerodrome had used air passing over gas-soaked wood balls.

I'm quite found of this period. If you like rotaries, make sure you check out the late Siemens-Halske units. With those, the engine spun one way, and the prop spun the other. Good fun.

Re:Contrarian thinking

[fmaresca]

Nop.
Multiple rows of cylinders where used to acommodate big engines (e.g. 28 cylinder Pratt and Whitney), so the cylinders not in the front row would be not cooled when the plane is not flying.

Re:Contrarian thinking

[Beat The Odds]

I'm reminded of the rotary engine, used in some WWI aircraft. The crankshaft was stationary -- attached to the plane's firewall -- and the entire engine block, including the cylinders, rotated around it. (The propeller was attached to the engine block.) In this way, no flywheel was necessary (the block was its own flywheel), saving weight, and the engine was cooled naturally, by the air flow over the moving cylinders. I don't know how the engines were balanced.

In a similar manner, the Sandia Cooler moves the heatsink through the air, rather than the air through the heatsink. It's solving a different problem, but I've always been fond of contrarian thinking like this.

No, you're not.

Re:Contrarian thinking

[subnomine]

I believe the team from Gamera II has another radical solution.

Re:Contrarian thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

Once in a while you run into an idea and you think ^$%#^$# that's good.
This s one of these. Simple, to the point effective. THank you slashdot for brining this to me, you made my day.

Re:Contrarian thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

Could it be overclocked?

Re:Contrarian thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

But such a heavy rotating mass makes for very unusual handling. When a small force is applied to a spinning disk in one direction a very large reaction happens in the mutually perpendicular third direction. Some fighter pilots would use it to make very very tight left turns, (or a right turn depending on the spin).

Typical WWI rotary engines had a right hand rotation (with thumb pointed in the direction of flight). The gyroscopic precession would lead to a plane turning to the right to having the engine push the nose to the right and down. On the other hand, turning to the left would tend to have the engine "fight" the turn while pushing the nose upward. The ease or difficulty with which a pilot could deal with the precession did make a difference in the real world flying of WWI.

As you note, the ability to turn right very quickly was used by some fighter pilots when facing planes with inline engines or planes piloted by inexperience pilots. However, just as deadly to the less experienced pilot was attempting a right turn at low altitude - especially upon take off - as that "down" part of the precession could lead to a sudden unscheduled landing.

Re:Contrarian thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

That way the fans would collect dust.

Re:Contrarian thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

Although the big engines that your referring to are what we think of as "fixed cylinders with rotating crank shaft" designs and not the early aviation" fixed crank shaft with rotating engine design". Imagine the gyroscopic precession on a rotating Wasp R-4360...ooftah!!!

Re:Contrarian thinking

[SuricouRaven]

Balancing is easy. I want to know how they got the fuel into those cylinders. A conventional fuel line and valve mechanism is obviously out of the question. Also, imagining the mass of something spinning that fast, I wonder if there were any problems with the giant flywheel insisting on conserving it's angular momentum in tight turns and wrenching itsself out of the airframe.

Re:Contrarian thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

The middle part of the "fan" moves fairly slowly and generates very little wind. It's the last half of the blades that does the job.

Re:Contrarian thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

When parked on runway that big fan was producing almost nothing but the engine was rotating anyway.

Consider that those stiff had pretty crazy compressions going on, 1000bhp 8cyl wasn't uncommon in wwii and we just replicated that with a twin turbo w16

Re:Contrarian thinking

[otuz]

The answer is in the article. Fuel was delivered via the crank case and of course the huge spinning mass had an effect on the vehicle.

Re:Contrarian thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

It was much more efficient to use the "giant fan" to push the plane forward, as it was designed to, than to divert its airflow for cooling. Air-cooled airplane engines get most of their intake air from the forward motion of the plane, so on-ground cooling is an issue when the plane is not moving, albeit a fairly small one in modern engines.

Re:Contrarian thinking

[garyebickford]

Of course one big difference - the fuel line for that 8cyl was a firehose compared to the straw going to the w16!

Re:Contrarian thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

Not at idle speeds. The engine of course runs cooler as well, but at idle the propeller provides almost no wind. Running the giant fan at full power would make the plane go away.

Re:Contrarian thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

It also helped with metallurgical problems. The Rhone rotary engine has zero reciprocating mass, which makes it less likely to throw a rod made of something they poured out of a Bessemer furnace.

until it crashes

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember the hard drive of lore: say like a 10MB CDC Hawk drive: 5MB fixed and 5MB removable platter.

The head floated on a cushion of air above the media.

When, for whatever reason, (bump, mild quake, etc.) the head no longer floated on that cushion of air, the resulting crash made a most impressive noise, rather like a freight train through the computer room.

Re:until it crashes

[ackthpt]

I remember the hard drive of lore: say like a 10MB CDC Hawk drive: 5MB fixed and 5MB removable platter.

The head floated on a cushion of air above the media.

When, for whatever reason, (bump, mild quake, etc.) the head no longer floated on that cushion of air, the resulting crash made a most impressive noise, rather like a freight train through the computer room.

Yep, good old physics. In my green days I was a system admin, for the last few years of a DEC PDP-11/55 with a couple of big ol' RP04 drives. With a sliding transparent top, I could watch the heads go into the disc pack when I spun it up (after swapping out packs OOF!) The field service techs knew something of the physics and explained to me - the heads, when the first are launced into the packs make a very brief contact with the disc surface of each platter before the cushion of air molecules forced them up, to effectively surf just above the platter. Amazing something so darn big did something like that and you could watch it.

Of course, when a head bit into the drive (head crash) you ended up with a cascading effect of emulsion flying all over in there and causing the other heads to lose their air cushion and bite it, too.

Re:until it crashes

[casualsax3]

Mechanical hard drives still rely on heads that float over the platter. These days they're built to operate an order of magnitude closer to the platter than 10-20 years ago - around 10 nanometers. The platters now spinning so fast that the head is also able to self regulate its height based solely on airflow dynamics and downforce. Small bumps and drops are not sufficient to break through the cushion of air created by the head moving over the platter at 80+ miles per our. Interestingly the force also works in the other direction, preventing the head from rising to high. You can picture it working like a magnet fixed in place over a superconductor, only this is obviously using a different force to accomplish the feat. For extreme bumps and drops, hard drives (particularly laptop hard drives) have accelerometers that can detect a drop or bump and call the head back to its resting place before it has a chance to smash into the platter.

Re:until it crashes

[Anonymous Coward]

...the force also works in the other direction....

find balance, you must

Re:until it crashes

[dead_user]

It's Bernoulli's Principle. See it in action: Take a business card, fold down 1/4" flaps on the short edges. Put the card on the table with the flaps pointed down. Now try and blow the card off the table without touching it. It's not impossible, but it sure is hard! The higher-velocity air passing under the card creates a low pressure spot under the card, pulling it toward the table.

No buildup, ever... except when you turn it off.

[Anonymous Coward]

And I bet when you turn it back on it gets clogged and jammed pretty good, and then you can kiss your CPU goodbye!
g=

Geez, another duplicate?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/07/12/1348243/the-fanless-spinning-heatsink

Can we get some new editors??

Re:Geez, another duplicate?

[localman57]

Yeah, also, TFA actually includes a publication date: 9/29/2011 . But hey, at least it isn't the "What's The Best way for me to store my Baby Pictures for 10,000 years" AskSlashdot again...

Re:Geez, another duplicate?

[Anonymous Coward]

And patent dates of '08...

Oh well.

I should go look up articles from 6/25/02 & start resubmitting them...

Re:Geez, another duplicate?

[Volante3192]

That's amazing!

Hey, everyone! We landed on the moon!!

Re:Geez, another duplicate?

[canajin56]

Researchers have made a breakthrough in a new stick-based ignition source. If further development pans out, this could end reliance on lightning strikes as the only source of fire.

Re:Geez, another duplicate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Come join today's new hip activity, breathing air! Try it along with refreshing beaches. Beaches, for all your evolution needs.

Re:Geez, another duplicate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Food goes in the mouth.

Re:Geez, another duplicate?

[Anonymous Coward]

News just in, all the cool kids are doing what is know an "cellular division". Parents & government worried about the threat to society.

Re:Geez, another duplicate?

[CanHasDIY]

Researchers have made a breakthrough in a new stick-based ignition source. If further development pans out, this could end reliance on foreign lightning strikes as the only source of fire.

FTFY.

You think that's something, wait until you see what futuristic discoveries we've been making in Stick-and-Rock technologies...

Re:Geez, another duplicate?

[Anonymous Coward]

also, what is "Sandia Research Laboratory"? Is that like Sandia National Laboratories?

Re:Geez, another duplicate?

[Anonymous Coward]

The first one was the article. This one's the ad.

Re:Geez, another duplicate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Editors? You mean "can we get someone to rewrite the editor scripts?"

Re:Geez, another duplicate?

[Chelloveck]

Really? Holy shit!

dust

[Shotgun]

But...all my fans get a layer of dust on each fan blade. What are they doing differently that will stop this?

Re:dust

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. My computer runs continuously until its time for its scheduled cleaning. My fans still have dust on the forward side of the blades.

Re:dust

[Anonymous Coward]

The sandia cooler acts like a hurricane/tornado, but in reverse. It draws the air in like a vortex. Instead of straight down over the use of several blades pulling the air in. Thus the dust will not end up on the blades, eventually it will coat the Chip, and POOF instant fire hazard.

Simple logic

Unless of course they figured out a filter system that traps dust on a cotton mesh or something.
https://encrypted-tbn1.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSYp-54v3Ltn32_XxggFKLDME_bbJGkzIypIZFO4PD1jiWDRQcK

Great concept, bad idea. I think this will do more harm than good in the long run

Re:dust

[Anonymous Coward]

And as the whole unit spins, you aren't going to get dust build up (ever)

none really?

I think not. Dust is not just 1 thing it is made of of LOTS of things. You smoke? Different kind of dust than what you get if you have cats or dogs, or live in a dry dusty area, or a smogy area, or get a lot of pollen ...

Then on top of that it is different sizes. Then different textures... some is gooy other fine powder. Just depends on what the dust is. Then even if you put a filter over it that only works for a small amount of time. How many people clean those out on a regular bases?...

If it depends on the layer of air they are talking about then it better have a decent filter and expect lots of seized fans...

Re:dust

[girlintraining]

But...all my fans get a layer of dust on each fan blade. What are they doing differently that will stop this?

Your blades also have hundreds of millimeters of clearance between them, not fractions of a millimeter. As well, dust requires an electric charge to stick to something... plastic has a very large static charge that 'grabs' the dust... use a different material and the charge is neutral. Problem solved.

Re:dust

[adisakp]

But...all my fans get a layer of dust on each fan blade. What are they doing differently that will stop this?

If you watch the video, one of the heatsink's designers specifically says that when the device is spinning quickly (at 2,000 RPM), any dust particles that land on the device get flung off by centrifugal force.

Re:dust

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for reminding me I need to change the AC filters!

Re:dust

[Anonymous Coward]

That's great! Now how does it work when the PC is turned off?

Re:dust

[DeTech]

Exactly this is why my metal house fan doesn't have dust on it... wait, it does, and it spins @ 1.75 kRPM.

Re:dust

[p4g3m4s7r]

Dust wont collect when spinning because the "blades" of the heatsink are oriented such that when they spin the layer of airflow that would normally form over them does not "separate" from the surface of the blades. This means the air on the blade is moving too quickly for the dust to get a good hold. I suspect this claim may be slight hyperbole, since dust will still build up on the blades immediately after it stops spinning, which will then diminish the separation layer effect and thus allow dust to start collecting on the blades while it starts moving. It will certainly at least build up dust much much more slowly though.

Re:dust

[Anonymous Coward]

I was thinking the exact same thing,
cat fur is the worst, I think it gets almost woven like fabric after a while.
I'd bet something important that it gets as much dust as any other propeller.

Re:dust

[p4g3m4s7r]

The layer of air refers to different velocity gradients in the air. I'm not sure what you were thinking it refers to, but by not having a separation layer, you're basically making it such that a relatively small number of molecules (as in 02, N2, etc.) ever even come to rest on the blade of the fan. Dust, no matter what it's made of, is many of orders of magnitude larger than these molecules, and as such will never come to rest on the blades except on manufacturing defects, and even then, it will only do so rarely. Sure, there will be a way for dust to build up, but this design will lead to an incredibly slow build up of dust compared to normal heatsinks.

Re:dust

[Anonymous Coward]

exactly like drift wood never gets caught in a river !

Re:dust

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, Charlie.
Each and every fan I have ever seen, rotating at various rates, collected dust.

Re:dust

[Gr8Apes]

... it spins @ 1.75 kRPM.

That extra 250 RPM does the trick!

Re:dust

[rrohbeck]

As well, dust requires an electric charge to stick to something...

Or tar, i.e. smoke.

Re:dust

[VortexCortex]

The centrifugal force is counteracted by the fact they're SUCKING AIR IN. Think about it really really hard... If the centrifugal forces keep dust out... why don't they keep the air out? Furthermore, air friction generates LIGHTNING. Well, on a small scale like this, it only generates static electricity. As with any new innovation, say the Microsoft Surface or the Knifork, don't believe it until you can buy it.

I just invented a machine that generates infinite energy! ::tosses a rock into the air:: Watch as it sticks to the ground! Try picking it up! Feel that energy pulling straight down?! It NEVER runs out!

Re:dust

[girlintraining]

Or tar, i.e. smoke.

Look, smokers kill themselves slowly... and every consumer electronics manual says "do not use near sources of water, do not smoke near device, do not use in dusty areas," etc. Engineers design equipment for people who actually give a damn about it. You can't engineer away stupidity.

Re:dust

[Coren22]

Is your house fan an impeller? As this is a fine tuned impeller that removes the problems on normal fans caused by a layer of still air, I am guessing they work on slightly different principles.

Re:dust

[Jarik C-Bol]

AND, because of the way the thing is designed, its very cleanable. Essentially, this is a maintainable fan. If it is designed right, the bladed part can be removed from the motor. Remove the milled aluminum (or copper) 'Heatsink' and wash the sucker out. Unlike a normal computer fan, which is pretty un-washable thin plastic, with an electric motor permanently fixed to the middle of it, so washing is out of the question.

Re:dust

[Coren22]

Knifork is for sale, unless this isn't what you are talking about...
http://www.kellamknives.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=418

Re:dust

[rrohbeck]

Yup, but I guess you haven't tried to fix a PC that was owned by a smoker. Eew.

Re:dust

[Jarik C-Bol]

On the other hand, Cat fur is kinda terrible for EVERYTHING. so stop keeping a nest of cats in the server room, and we should be good. I think what we can all take away from this is that:
1. dust. its everywhere.
2. its bad for computers.
3. People that actually care about their computers may actually try and clean their house, and not leave there computer under their desk on the floor where it is going to draw in every single particle of filth in the house.
4. there is no four.

It constantly amazes me how people totally ignore their computers internals, and then get pissy when it fills up with cat hair and cigarette smoke and stops working. Its a machine with moving parts people, some general maintenance and care will be required.

Re:dust

[Anonymous Coward]

... and every consumer electronics manual says "do not use near sources of water, do not smoke near device, do not use in dusty areas,"

"Device only intended for operation in non-existent fantasy land."

Re:dust

[Khyber]

I haze zero issues soaking my fans in pure denatured alcohol for cleaning them.

Let me guess, you're silly enough to think of using something conductive like water to clean.

Re:dust

[Anonymous Coward]

As well, dust requires an electric charge to stick to something...

Or water. Spinning fan blades cause increased pressure gradients at their leading edges that cause water vapour to come back out of the air, moistening the blades and sticking the dust on the blades. Whether its computer fans or ceiling fans, the problem is the same. In theory the Sandia fans are suction devices so won't experience this issue.

Re:dust

[baker_tony]

Explained in the video.

Re:dust

[Anonymous Coward]

And he is a moron.

My fans spin at 3,000 RPM and still collect dust on the blade leading edges.

Re:dust

[Jarik C-Bol]

you and I may be smart enough to not do something moronic like that, but we both know, 'people' are dumb, and will do stupid things like put water on electronics. If you only have to clean a block of metal, the 'general user' serviceability increases.

Re:dust

[Waccoon]

So, with all the gimmicks in the aftermarket PC cooling industry, why haven't I seen neutral-charge fans?

Re:dust

[Anonymous Coward]

Your blades also have hundreds of millimeters of clearance between them, not fractions of a millimeter.

Hundreds of millimeters of clearance are pretty hard to get even if we are talking mainframes.

Re:dust

[badatnicknames]

There's no such thing as a centrifugal force (http://xkcd.com/123/)

Re:dust

[Agent0013]

I have washed motherboards in the sink before. If there are no moving electrons in the electronics, it can be dumped in all the water that you want. Just make sure it is dry before powering it up again.

This won't prevent dust buildup

[Anonymous Coward]

...at the air inlets and exits. And the way laptop coolers are designed, that is the primary problem I have encountered.

Will it work in laptops?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the possibility of dynamic movement of a laptop during its use, will the Sandia Cooler work inside of a laptop?

Re:Will it work in laptops?

[localman57]

They have yet to convince me that it will even work in a desktop...

Re:Will it work in laptops?

[Immerman]

I doubt it would even work well on desktops - you think it's bad when some heavy-footed passerby causes your angels foodcake to collapse...

Re:Will it work in laptops?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool, my computers only ever experience static movement.

Re:Will it work in laptops?

[TheGratefulNet]

they haven't been heavy-footed,

since the angels have stolen

my red shoes...

Re:Will it work in laptops?

[Metabolife]

I honestly hope that within 1 year, we won't need laptop coolers for anything but the desktop replacements.

Re:Will it work in laptops?

[ArsonSmith]

This is the normal geek idea of "bump and grind" when they play that song.

Re:Will it work in laptops?

[neonKow]

I doubt it. That's not really a priority for most buyers.

Re:Will it work in laptops?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention that depending on the case, it's likely there's still no standard orientation for a motherboard either. (This just isn't a problem with laptops.) Something that is designed for a vertical mount likely wont work so well in a horizontal mount and vice-versa. From what I can understand, I don't think air bearings work too well if orientated 90-deg off of the axis which is intended to have the load. I picture that instead of settling down nicely when shut down, the fan will spin around like a wheel going mad around inside its casing and cause all kinds of vibration.

DUPE!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I've read about this magic heatsink before... somewhere....

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/07/12/1348243/The-Fanless-Spinning-Heatsink

Re:DUPE!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, beat you to it. Look up 5 comments.

Oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, why do the blades on my fan gather dust? They are spinning too. No dust, me no beLIEve.

Re:Oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, why do the blades on my fan gather dust?

Clean your room, maybe that'll give your mom a chance to vacuum in there once in a while.

Startup/Heat Transfer

[ThunderBird89]

Maybe I just didn't get the message, but what draws heat away from the die itself? This setup probably does away with thermal paste and similar junctions...

The other thing is that hydrodynamic bearings are only self-supporting and quasi-frictionless after a threshold RPM is reached. Before the whole setup is spinning fast enough for hydrodynamic effects to take over, it's going to grind against the chip die, and unless they came up with something good, it's going to destroy it on startup...

Re:Startup/Heat Transfer

[Anonymous Coward]

The air-gap is so small, it does not act as an insulator--its actually a very good conductor of heat.

The air itself is the thermal interface.

One of those odd-ball, exception to the general rule, thermodynamic things

Re:Startup/Heat Transfer

[kylegordon]

Maybe I just didn't get the message, but what draws heat away from the die itself? This setup probably does away with thermal paste and similar junctions...

From the video... there's a normal heatsink, and the fan draws the heat from the heatsink through the air bearing.

The other thing is that hydrodynamic bearings are only self-supporting and quasi-frictionless after a threshold RPM is reached. Before the whole setup is spinning fast enough for hydrodynamic effects to take over, it's going to grind against the chip die, and unless they came up with something good, it's going to destroy it on startup...

It's Sandia... I'm sure they've thought of that.

Re:Startup/Heat Transfer

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I don't see anything in the very in-depth video that was linked in the summary that would indicate that no thermal paste would be needed. The air-gap is between the heat sink chassis (or base plate) and the spinning heat sink, and appears to be a very efficient means of expelling heat from the device. However there will need to be some kind of thermal interface between the chassis and the CPU.

Maybe one day we'll see this heat sink assembly actually integrated into the CPU packaging which would eliminate the need for thermal paste. I think it's a neat concept and if people actually watched the video they would also understand how dust build up is being minimized.

Re:Startup/Heat Transfer

[sjames]

Commonly there's a conventional bearing that disengages once the aerodynamic effects take over (that is, the spinning part lifts off of the bearing).

Re:Startup/Heat Transfer

[p4g3m4s7r]

Maybe I just didn't get the message, but what draws heat away from the die itself?

As you can see in the images in both articles and in the descriptions in both articles, there's non-spinning portion of the cooler that would sit on the heat spreader (since Intel and AMD would probably not quit using heat-spreaders if these became popular). The incredibly thin gap of air between the two pieces of metal means that the air gap is actually an incredible conductor of heat. The original article (2011) did a better job of explaining this.

The other thing is that hydrodynamic bearings are only self-supporting and quasi-frictionless after a threshold RPM is reached. Before the whole setup is spinning fast enough for hydrodynamic effects to take over, it's going to grind against the chip die, and unless they came up with something good, it's going to destroy it on startup...

Again, this doesn't spin on the heat-spreader, and also, the axial bearing is not an air bearing, so it would not have this problem. All they would have to do is make sure that the heatsink starts spinning with a gap between the two sections that is larger than the anticipated air gap and then change said gap using cheap electromagnets when the heatsink is up to speed.

Re:Startup/Heat Transfer

[wisnoskij]

Yes but the whole point of a heat sink and the reason it works is that heat effortlessly travels up through the specially developed paste/glue and then the metal. It is basically part of it. I do not see how an air bearing could have the needed approximately 0 insulation. To work you need a great heat transforming material to be in contact with the entire chip and at no point have a choke point for this heat.
  And air is a great insulator, and by definition an air bearing has a layer of air insulating one side from the other.

I am 100% convinced that this method would keep the heat-sink cold, but I do not see how it could still act as a heat sink to the processor. Maybe if they replaced the air with a good heat conducting oil.

Re:Startup/Heat Transfer

[Silentknyght]

Maybe I just didn't get the message, but what draws heat away from the die itself? This setup probably does away with thermal paste and similar junctions...

The other thing is that hydrodynamic bearings are only self-supporting and quasi-frictionless after a threshold RPM is reached. Before the whole setup is spinning fast enough for hydrodynamic effects to take over, it's going to grind against the chip die, and unless they came up with something good, it's going to destroy it on startup...

Take a look at the presentation on the parent site: https://ip.sandia.gov/techpdfs/Sandia%20Cooler%20presentation.pdf

There's an underside view of the mechanism, itself. As others have said, it's a spinning heatsink on top of a baseplate, and the presentation includes a visual the thermal interface between plate & die. I imagine arctic silver isn't going anywhere. The airgap is between the spinning heatsink and the baseplate (also well-illustrated in the presentation).

Re:Startup/Heat Transfer

[Anonymous Coward]

The 1/1000" air bearing is what the heat transmits through.

It's not actually floating freely. The motor that spins the heatsink supports it at low/zero speeds. The point of the air bearing is that the motor only has to support the weight during spinup and shutdown, not during normal, stable, operation.

Re:Startup/Heat Transfer

[newcastlejon]

And air is a great insulator, and by definition an air bearing has a layer of air insulating one side from the other.

Air sitting still ins indeed a good insulator, but that lessens dramatically when you start to churn the air about. As I understand the paper (I've had some time to peruse it, after all :P) their goal was actually to side-step the problem with the boundary layer that forms on normal heatsinks, where a thin layer of air tends to "stick" and hamper heat transfer. In their prototype the spinning motion of the heatsink/impeller combined with the small gap between that and the base plate acts to significantly reduce the insulating effect of the boundary layer. If you assume the area between impeller and baseplate is roughly the same as the area of a conventional heatsink - it's actually much, much smaller by the way - then reducing the boundary layer really does help heat transfer. A similar principle applies to the impeller itself, where the constant motion of the blades serves to reduce the boundary layer there too.

The paper is pretty accessible, I suggest you take a look.

Re:Startup/Heat Transfer

[Jarik C-Bol]

there is a thermal plate in between the Die and the fan, with thermal paste, the spinning part rides against that plate for the milliseconds before the hydrodynamics take effect. Watch the bloody video.

Re:Startup/Heat Transfer

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing that hasn't been pointed out yet is this would only be practical in situations where you know for sure it's going to be kept level (unless I'm missing something) such as a rack mounted server. If it's used in a tower configuration can it float sideways?

Re:Startup/Heat Transfer

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I'll have to watch the video again, but I don't think it is actually "floating". I'm thinking that it is still resting on the axle and the air cushion serves as mostly a thermal conductor with an extra benefit of providing extra support to allow the axle to not be as big. I don't see any reason why this thing couldn't work sideways.

Re:Startup/Heat Transfer

[abernathy]

I've been to Sandia and I've seen the prototype. The heat is drawn away from the chip die by a conventional spreader (could be aluminum or copper), which would likely be coupled to the chip die with thermal paste. The base plate is one half of the air bearing, and the rotor/impeller is the other half. There's a hub in the middle consisting of a stator and rotor. The air bearing is kept in a dynamic stasis by magnets (probably as part of the motor, but I didn't ask about this detail). This ensures that the air bearing gap is maintained within the required close tolerances and also means that the cooler is attitude-insensitive. You can run it upside-down. I do not know how shock-sensitive the air-bearing is, but I would be surprised if it were especially delicate.

As for the efficiency of the air bearing as a thermal couple, I would refer you to the official scientifical wordage at: http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/2010/100258.pdf. The bottom line is that stagnant air (like on a static heat sink) is a pretty effective thermal insulator. Air moving around (as over whirling blades, or in the air bearing itself) is pretty good at conducting heat. If the fluid dynamics and thermal analyses they've done are correct (and "they," meaning Dr. Koplow, are not prone to being wrong about such matters), both the cooling effect and the heat transfer across the air bearing are quite favorable.

I asked Dr. Koplow about the "grinding" effect when the air bearing is not established (powering up and down), and he explained that while this is not a significant issue (both surfaces are pretty smooth and won't be in contact for long, if at all) it is going to be managed in a production context. I can tell you that the solution is obvious and intuitive, but I'm not sure that I'm at liberty to discuss exactly how they licked this problem, so I'm going to have to hold the line at, "ya gotta believe me, it works."

As for the reappearance of this story at present, the news peg is that they've actually licensed the technology now (but aren't saying to whom). I heard rumors of interest from very large players, but note that only two licenses have been granted, apparently for lighting and chip cooling applications. I am dying to find out who.

CPU Lapping

[DigiShaman]

That's right boys and girls. Start lapping those CPUs to a mirror finish. Lap lap lap...

Deja vu

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe this has already been posted...http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/07/12/1348243/the-fanless-spinning-heatsink

Sounds good.

[theswimmingbird]

Shut up and take my money!

Underground bike gears

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey I just had a breakthrough, who needs sandia?

I have invented the underground community bicycle power device. You simply hook your computer up to the chain.

Get to peddling.

But what when it crashes?

[Cyfun]

If I remember correctly, this is the same concept as the head that floats above a hard disk platter. My question is: If something fails or the computer is bumped hard enough, will this processor fan start gouging into the CPU die? Let's find out!

Re:But what when it crashes?

[Osgeld]

do they even make CPU's with exposed die's anymore?

Re:But what when it crashes?

[Vegemeister]

Laptop CPUs, sometimes.

PC fans too

[OrangeTide]

The stator (the stationary part) of a DC brushless motor found in a typical case fan is the shaft in the center, while the outside (the rotor) part spins the hub of the fan. Not unlike those old aircraft engines.

oomph

[Anonymous Coward]

"unless they came up with something good"

you mean a spring and a clutch?

Why do armchair engineers assume it is their duty to enlighten the rest of us knuckle-draggers that actually do this for a living?

Re:oomph

[kylegordon]

It's almost as if they didn't bother reading the fscking article. Oh no, it's the editors that ignore minor details like that!

You can never get rid of the dust!

[xOneca]

Just sayin'

Re:You can never get rid of the dust!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you could if you make the case positively-pressured. Draw cool air *in* (through a filter) instead of blowing hot air *out*. The case would then be considerably less likely to build up dust.

There are a ton of other efficiency problems to work out, but at least there'd be no dust!

Re:You can never get rid of the dust!

[Jarik C-Bol]

with this setup, that is a reasonable possibility. The video indicates that with this device, cooler outside air enters the center of the fan, takes up heat, and exits the sides. with the appropriate housing, an air filter could be installed on the intake of the fan. if/when this becomes publicly available, I foresee case mods with little duct to the outside of the case and have the filter externally accessible. Any number of air filters from the automotive world cold be adapted, and you then just have to remember that your computer takes an air filter from a 2009 model Jetta or something. I wonder why this has not happened already. You already change the filters in your car, your home AC, etc, why not do the smart thing, and add filters to your desktop tower?

Re:You can never get rid of the dust!

[sir1real]

The description clearly says "And as the whole unit spins, you aren't going to get dust build up (EVER)." Emphasis mine.

In other words, they're claiming zero dust build up because the unit spins. Not because of air filters. If you want to eliminate dust with the use of air filters you don't need a spinning heat sink.

Re:You can never get rid of the dust!

[Jarik C-Bol]

i never claimed they said anything else. What I am saying is, paranoid people could (and probably should) implement that sort of setup, and this particular cooler would be somewhat more easily adapted to the application.

Re:No buildup, ever... except when you turn it off

[sudden.zero]

Turn it off? Who turns their computers off? Uptime: 3481 day(s), 6 hour(s), 33 minute(s) :P

Does this make Sandia a patent troll?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless they start producing heat sinks on a commercial scale themselves, that is.

Air is a thermal insulator

[sdguero]

As a former thermal lab technician for a server manufacturer, I'm very skeptical...

Re:Air is a thermal insulator

[Anonymous Coward]

If your working fluid is moving fast enough, it stops mattering how conductive it is. The Reynolds number starts to dominate all the heat transfer coefficients. The problem with cooling is always the boundary layer, where the fluid stagnates and acts as an insulator. Sandia's found a way to minimize the boundary layer by shrinking the gap between heatsink and fan. Props to them.

Do not want...

[CaptainLugnuts]

'Just' 2000 rpm? So it'll sound like a hair dryer. No thanks, I'll keep my 450 rpm silent CPU fan.

2000RPM?

[sdguero]

According to the .pdf linked on the press article, it spins at 5,000 RPM.

Spinning a heat sink that weighs several ounces take a much more powerful motor than a plastic fan. I'd expect it's a to harder on the bearings (i.e. less reliable), and requires a lot more power than a traditional heatsink/fan setup.

Re:2000RPM?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it had bearings it would be reasonable to assume it would be harder on them.

Re:2000RPM?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have to say whatever is rotating there is definitely at 5000rpm, possibly a little less, but not by much.

As someone who is extremely familiar (and sensitive) to noise, and prefers his PCs to be as quiet as possible (but within reason), 2000rpm is acceptable but only under extreme conditions (heavy CPU load thus high temperatures thus higher RPM). 1000rpm or less would be much more reasonable.

If you watch the video (or skim through it and find scenes where the device is spinning), you can hear the noise it emits. It's high-pitch and loud; I stopped watching the video roughly 2 minutes ago and the noise is still resonating in my skull. That kind of constant droning white noise is unacceptable for consumer PC systems.

The noise itself reminds me of some SCSI 10krpm and 15krpm hard disks, as well as some older 7200rpm PATA hard disks, and even an ancient 5.25" MFM hard disk. It's too loud, and is at an uncomfortable frequency. I'm betting they can decrease the noise by adjusting the edges of the fins, much like what fan manufacturers do (companies such as Noctua have patented such designs); you end up with a fan that can run at 2000rpm but sounds more like 750rpm given its fin design. Maybe these guys should hire some submarine propulsion system designers... ;-)

Re:2000RPM?

[A Friendly Troll]

At around 3:50 in the video, they shut down the motor, and the "fan" then becomes very reasonable in sound emitted.

It's an interesting concept, but yeah, with this motor and this type of sound, I wouldn't want it anywhere near me, or I'd get a migraine almost immediately.

Re:2000RPM?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you misunderstand what an an air bearing is. It really is air, and therefore can take the added stress. Also if the setup has lower friction than a normal fan, a more powerful motor is not needed.

Re:2000RPM?

[Jarik C-Bol]

also important to note that they stated at that point in the video that the motor was operating without its housings, which they said would greatly dampen the sound.

30x more cooling

[sl4shd0rk]

My CPU normally runs around 140 degrees so at 30x more cooling I should be well into the -4000F range!

Re:30x more cooling

[Bengie]

I hope the liquid CO2 doesn't corrode your motherboard.

Re:30x more cooling

[MemoryAid]

Try to think of cooling in terms of watts.

I realize this is a joke, but the possibility (very real generally, but hopefully less likely on Slashdot) that somebody could misapprehend the phrase '30x more cooling' so egregiously tramples the intended humor.

Sandia Research Laboratory?

[kevmeister]

Just for the record, the research facility where this work was done is "Sandia National Laboratory", not "Sandia Research Laboratory". Sandia is a research facility funded by the US Department of Energy. Your tax dollars at work (if you pay US taxes).

Re:Sandia Research Laboratory?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong again. For real this time, the research facility where this work was done is "Sandia National Laboratories". They are engineering and research facilities managed by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed-Martin, for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which in turn is a semi-autonomous part of the U.S. Department of Energy. While NNSA needs are certainly the primary mission focus, NNSA funding is less than half of the total funding received. From my experience, it is true that the significant majority of funding is from U.S. government sources but a small amount is from private sources as well. Put another way, your tax dollars at work (mostly, if you pay US taxes that is). ;)

no dust? unbeleveable

[frovingslosh]

as the whole unit spins, you aren't going to get dust build up (ever).

That seems like a strange comment, since I get dust build-up on faster spinning (and even larger) fan blades, I also have doubts about the heat transfer across an air gap, no silver thermal compound here.

Re:no dust? unbeleveable

[wiedzmin]

Oh, no the dust will instead build up in the thousandth of an inch gap between the spinny part and the CPU :) Completely different set of problems than what you're used to dealing with! Have fun cleaning that out :)

Re:no dust? unbeleveable

[ThatsMyNick]

Fortunately the air flow speed is so high between the spiny part and the CPU that it would be impossible for dust to stick on it.

Re:no dust? unbeleveable

[wiedzmin]

How does it stick to fan blades?

Re:no dust? unbeleveable

[ThatsMyNick]

Because thickness between two fan blades is hardly thousandth of an inch. There is literally lot of air flowing in the space and speed is way higher than anything seen on fan blades. Also there are spots on fan blades that see very good air flow and there are spots that see very little. The ones that see very little, tend to accumulate dust overtime.

Re:Could see this working but one major drawback.

[Ignacio]

You mean like it's limited the sale of hard drives?

Shaking or vibration?

[Dwedit]

What happens if the computer shakes or vibrates? Is it going to collide with the CPU at any point?

Re:No buildup, ever... except when you turn it off

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need to worry about it jamming because smash and bake the CPU the first time you turn it off.

Re:No buildup, ever... except when you turn it off

[Anonymous Coward]

What? You haven't even reached a decade of uptime?

Target application.

[DeTech]

Lol, "laptops". Guess what happens to a flywheel spinning at 5k RPM on a air bearing when some rotates their laptop... Sorry sandia national labs, it my world I can't turn physics off.

Re:Target application.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh most laptops already have a flywheel rotating inside at 5000rpm on a fluid bearing. 5400rpm in fact. It's called a hard drive.

Re:Target application.

[Khyber]

Not one fucking thing since HDDs in laptops are 5K+ RPM and capable of handling 75+G and get moved around all the time.

In your world, you must be too poor to own a laptop. Must also mean a poor understanding of physics as well.

So, that means you're a 90s child.

Re:Target application.

[DeTech]

FYI. HD platters aren't on air bearings. They (normally) have an offset pair to counter act overturning generated by angular momentum. Sounds like your brain could use an upgrade.

Re:Target application.

[Khyber]

This is a laptop. Typically, they DON'T have an offset pair.

hi, I was one of the top-level techs for HP, repairing even HDDs for their consumer and business laptops.

We're talking about LAPTOPS. Not 3.5" drives that can fit that kind of stuff into it.

Re:Target application.

[DeTech]

Ok "top-level" HP repair tech. How many had air bearings holding up the platters... yup. Zero. Zilch. Nada. No wonder why you got fired.

Re:Target application.

[Khyber]

we're talking about heads, not the platters themselves (well except for how their rotation creates a cushion of air.) Learn how to follow the conversation.

I never got fired. Look at your moronic assumption. Also, look at your poor knowledge of fluid dynamics.

Re:Target application.

[DeTech]

Heads don't spin (well except yours)... Let's summarize since you're obviously have difficulty following.

It's ok, I'm patient and don't mind helping out the handicapped.

The heat sink/impeller spins of an air bearing, since it is rotating it is subject to conservation of angular momentum. If you were to rotate the laptop while it was spinning the reaction torque would collapse your air gap causing your air bearing to stop functioning.

Hopefully you managed to stay off your crack pipe long enough to make it through that paragraph. No one is arguing the feasibility of the air bearing, it's just like the boundary layer of lubricant on your mom's butt-hole.

easy... really easy.

Dust Free.... yeah right....

[Lumpy]

Dear researchers, please notice how dust will cake and adhere to spinning things. Ask the airline industry how dust can cake on even turbine blades.

It's not dust free, please take the marketing people out back and beat them with a sack of doorknobs.

Does it work?

[gelfling]

The article sounds like a summary of a patent application. I wonder if this thing actually exists and more importantly, works and if it works does it work well?

Re:CS REtard

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank God, if he was one of those moron Engineers the whole thing would be a mess.

never ever listen to the drooling morons that have "engineer" on their business card.

The cool air goes in the top center, the heat goes

[Streetlight]

The cool air goes in the top center of this design and the heated air goes out the outer edges of the turbine/fan blades. So hot air will be distributed over the surface of the mother board (MB), heating other components. If this all happens in an enclosed tower case, the heated air still needs to be exhausted from the box, probably requiring the typical noisy muffin fans. In the very tight spaces of a laptop/ultrabook/new Apple MBPro, I wonder if appropriate ducting can be designed. Interesting challenges.

Vapor

[Osgeld]

Patented in 08, article in 11, and 2 slashdot articles and what do we have ... jack shit nothing, its vaporware making outrageous claims and a pretty silly idea to boot. Besides why would you want to listen to a large chunk of metal spinning at 2000 RPM? The thing is full of hard edges, which cuts though the air, which produces .... (wait for it)

MORE NOISE

ugh

+5 - Bulls4!t

[Anonymous Coward]

I 100% guarantee that the pictured device will be fully clogged with dust within 6 months of operation in nearly any office environment that I have experienced.

The only thing I see in this "cooler" / fan is tolerances so tight as to guarantee a high failure rate.

Peltier's

[DarthVain]

Reminds me of an article that was was put on explaining this revolutionary technology where by current was applied to a wafer, making one side cold and the other hot, a remarkable achievement for cpu cooling. Peltier's having been around for ages of course.

I used to do a lot of system building and modding for fun years ago. However OC has gone mainstream and as such has become a bit pointless. With the mainstream and Intel/AMD being well aware of that fact, they price pretty accordingly. Also modern manufacturing techniques and cpu quality mean you can OC using just about stock for decent results.

There was a time where you could buy a dirt cheap chip, apply a bit of awesomesause to it, and get something remarkable that was as powerful as something much more expensive. You HAD to use peltier's, water blocks (ironically also mainstream now to little point), huge custom copper sinks, etc... Heck I remember a company that made little direct to cpu refrigeration cases (phase exchange cooling) for the really hardcore (or liquid nitrogen for those really mad). I still have about 6 Intel Celreron processors in my desk (between 433 to 500Mhz in matching pairs), from when "dual core" actually meant 2 actual physical CPU (miss 2cpu.com)... Modding BP6's and dual Golden Orbs, so the caps fit in the rad.

Anyway now you can just buy an i5k and say to your "Bios" (which is now graphical) "run it a lot faster" and it just does stock. (I still want one though :)

At some point, I realized that at a certain threshold, you are just doing it for fun, that there really are no performance gains. It is much easier to simply buy a slightly more expensive cpu than to OC it. You have to just love to do it. I mean for an i5 and a crazy 100$ heat sink, you can just buy an i7 and stock OC for better gains likely. It also doesn't help that Intel seems to like to change sockets every 3 months now, which will probably limit how many times you can reuse that "universal" non-stock heatsink.

That said, I would buy one of these if they aren't too expensive. I always thought the round heat sinks look cooler at least (if they aren't physically in reality).

Re:No buildup, ever... except when you turn it off

[Anonymous Coward]

Turn it off? Who turns their computers off?

Uptime: 3481 day(s), 6 hour(s), 33 minute(s) :P

Yea?

anonymousCoward@stats01-primary:~$ uptime
  14:51:40 up 635 days, 18:13, 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.01, 0.00

Admittedly it is running a much lighter load now, being that's it's hopefully soon to be retired, but very much still in production.

lol

[Charliemopps]

He says it's "dustless" because it's spinning so fast the dust just gets "flung off" LOL
That thing would get gummed up, off balance, and fail to work in about a week at my house.

Y no water?

[rrohbeck]

I'd rather have IBM's fluid micro channels going through my next Intel or AMD CPU.

Taking this thinking further..

[AwesomeMcgee]

Spin the heatsink instead of a fan in the heatsink.. genius, I've got it, better yet, let's spin the heatsink with the chip attached! The whole motherboard even, then it will cool my ram and GPU as well! I'll just attach the motherboard to the bottom of my washer, and put it on a non-stop spin cycle! Dust free and smelling of daises AT ALL TIMES!

These Sandia folks are truly geniuses. I am awed.

Re:Taking this thinking further..

[stoatwblr]

Better add a rinse cycle, just for good measure.

Failure mode

[pubwvj]

Don't you just love moving parts?
Fast moving parts?
Close fast moving parts?
And then one day it stops and the chip blows up due to the instantaneous heat load.
Thrilling!

Great patent idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope Sandia patents it and it revolutionizes cooling and they make bank. That way then the FEDGOV declares bankruptcy (or refuses to and crashes the currency), they will still be making cool projects there. :D

I challenge the Dust Free Theory.

[Nyder]

My fans spin pretty fucking fast, and yet, they have dust on them (and cat hair, got to love the cat hair).

Let's go for a real world test. Put the heat sink in my computer, and let's see what happens.

Re:I challenge the Dust Free Theory.

[steelfood]

Until it's real-world tested, I wouldn't want it anywhere near my computer. Keep it in the lab please, and let me know the results once you're done.

Dup

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and many of us saw this last year.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/07/12/1348243/the-fanless-spinning-heatsink

Hardly seems worth it.....noise

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no free lunch here. If they are using a metal rotor I can certainly hear the vibration when the unit is rotating, sounds like the bearing of a hard drive, a high pitch whine. The white noise (low speed, large blade) from a conventional fan has been replaced with whine noise.

I can just see somebody poking around in the CPU case and being bitten by this thing, large, high speed exposed metal blades.

Re:No buildup, ever... except when you turn it off

[Anonymous Coward]

Turn it off? Who turns their computers off? Uptime: 3481 day(s), 6 hour(s), 33 minute(s) :P

I thought we gave up on these lame ass "jokes" a long time ago. Or are you asserting that you haven't applied a kernel update for 9.5 years?

I'm restarting my systems once a month, along with the MS systems. There's usually at least a kernel security update at that frequency, let alone all the other stuff that needs updates. And I don't even run Ubuntu who seems to have kernel updates ever two weeks.

Re:The cool air goes in the top center, the heat g

[Jarik C-Bol]

which is why they invented ducting.

Re:No buildup, ever... except when you turn it off

[Khyber]

When your system isn't online and you're only using it for a dedicated task, you quite often don't upgrade shit if it's stable.

Airport traffic patterns?

[dtmos]

Was it this feature that lead to the standard of airport traffic patters being left-turn only? Did that convention start as a military requirement in WWI, and then move into civil aviation after the war, even though rotary engines were obsolete by then? Wikipedia states that this convention developed "because most small airplanes are piloted from the left seat (or the senior pilot or pilot-in-command sits in the left seat), and so the pilot has better visibility out the left window"; while that's no doubt true, one wonders whether this is an incorrect historical rationalization after-the-fact, or a conscious decision made independently, at a later meeting of some international regulatory body. When was the left-hand traffic pattern standardized?

I find it hard to believe their claims

[viperidaenz]

And as the whole unit spins, you aren't going to get dust build up (ever).

Yeah right... because the blades on fans don't accumulate dust...ever... not on the leading edges or on the high pressure surfaces.... I've never had to clean dust off fans....

Vertical?

[El_Isma]

I'm wondering why nobody has asked yet how does this work on a non-horizontal CPU. And what would happen if the surface is slanted? Will it spin and go loose?

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to be a buzz-kill, but you're talking about a fan turning in air. Unless this fan is magically frictionless with air it is going to build up or lose electrons, and become charged. Dust ends up being attracted to it, despite the fact that it's moving. In my experience, in a dusty environment the fan, despite moving does build up dust, usually on the leading edges of the fan blades as the fan turns. Unless they've demonstrated in a real-world, unfiltered dusty environment, that it doesn't gather dust as much as conventional fans, this is another pointless slashdot non-article slashvertisement. Dragging the fan blades/heatsink body through the air seems like a great way, (like Monster Cables) to convince overcredulous morons to spend a bunch of money buying something that doesn't really do anything especially different from what the older, less expensive solution did. Sorry. Slashdot fails again.

Old ass news, already been on slashdot.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/07/12/1348243/the-fanless-spinning-heatsink
Guys, stop reposting old shit and give us new news.

Re:Old ass news, already been on slashdot.

[jaymemaurice]

I was wondering if anyone else noticed this.. you are correct... this is another re-slash

Better Article and Interview at ExtremeTech

[KonoWatakushi]

See The fanless heatsink: Silent, dust-immune, and almost ready for prime time, and an interview with the inventor.

Disbelief of the dust-immune property of this cooler is addressed in the first question of the interview:

Jeff Koplow: I did not mean to imply that there is literally no dust fouling; some dust accumulation eventually becomes visible to the naked eye on the very leading edge of the blades. The point is that dust fouling is reduced to such a large extent that we are unable to detect any degradation of cooling performance operating the device in a relatively dirty environment over an extended period of time. Thus for all intents and purposes the dust fouling problem has been taken off the table. In contrast, with conventional CPU coolers, eventually the entire heat exchanger surface becomes entombed in dust. I suppose there are some applications in which computers are operated in extremely dusty environments that might be too much for the heat-sink-impeller. This is common sense. In trying to figure out a way around the longstanding problem of CPU cooler dust fouling, I was thinking in terms of residential and commercial environments where the vast majority of PCs are found.

Once again, it is disappointing how many people so yearn for the status quo, when presented with clearly superior technologies. Not that they always pan out, but it is disheartening to see such hostility toward progress.

Re:Better Article and Interview at ExtremeTech

[MrL0G1C]

I don't think the hostility is towards progress, I think it is against statements that are highly likely untrue and insult our nerd intelligences, with statements like 'And as the whole unit spins, you aren't going to get dust build up (ever)' and 'in the order of 30x more efficient than your typical heatsink-fan setup'

If it where in the order of 30x more efficient then why isn't it 1/10th of the size? What do they regard as a 'typical heatsink-fan' setup? etc, '30x more efficient' sounds like bs, the article and Sandia seem to offer very little in the way of actual benchmarks and hard facts.

Re:Better Article and Interview at ExtremeTech

[L4t3r4lu5]

Dust isn't the problem. As he says, it slips off most surfaces. The big problem is oils. Go open up a computer which is used in a commercial kitchen, or that belonging to a smoker. You'll see the insides are coated in oil and tar, and that stuff collects dust like hobos collect fag ends. When they make it able to withstand 20-a-day, or 3 months in the same room as a deep fat fryer, I'll be impressed.

I've seen smoke destroy PCs, games consoles, DVD players... All of them have high-speed components utterly gummed up with oil / dust. Barely anything ever dies to dust alone unless it's left for a VERY long time.

What about vertical motherboards

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have a vertical motherboard, what keeps the heatsink gap from widening?

Deja Vu

[Anonymous Coward]

oh, good god. This was first posted here MONTHS ago. Somebody posts a new video about it and that justifies all kinds of fresh gushing about this "new" development? Or has the nerd attention span really gotten that short?

Not so Contrarian?

[bill_mcgonigle]

I don't know how contrarian this is - it sounds to me like they're just copying these guys.

Re:Not so Contrarian?

[jaymemaurice]

How dare these Sadia guys copy those Sandia guys and lead us to post the same invention on Slashdot twice.

A year old?

[anubi]

This thing is Nicolai Tesla's Boundary Drag Pump...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_turbine

Looks like what they patented is using it as a heat exchanger by heating the rotor.

Re:A year old?

[dysan27]

In no way is this like a Boundary Drag Pump. It has blades, the defining characteristic of a Tesla pump is that it DOSEN'T have blades. Yes they both talk about the boundary layer effect, but the heat sink is trying to minimize it as it impeads heat transer to the air, while a tesla pump tries to maximize it as that is how the pump transfers motion to the liquid.

Suggestion : Asymmetrically Spaced Impeller Blades

[Anonymous Coward]

I read their paper a few months ago and they planned on using computer simulations to optimize impeller blade aerodynamics. The design is remarkably quiet however they could further reduce human perceived noise with asymmetrically spaced impeller blades like in the new MacBook Pro. This would create multiple harmonics rather than a single harmonic thus distributing the sound over a larger portion of the audio spectrum (assuming apple will let them use the idea). - John Talbot, Ottawa U. Physics

Fans have dust too!

[Agent0013]

I don't know where they are getting the "Additionally, high-speed rotation completely eliminates the problem of heat exchanger fouling." from. I have seen fan blades that get caked with dust. It eventually gets so bad you can hear the dust on the blades hitting the housing as the fan turns.

My other concern is the boundary layer between the spinning heat sink and the stationary plate. Wouldn't this area be a bottleneck for heat transfer similar to the way they talk about the air boundary on regular heat sink fins creates a bottleneck?

Old article

[stoatwblr]

It might be nice in a server room to reduce noise (94dBA in mine at the moment), but I hate to think how it'd fare in a domestic environment - particularly with "sticky" fine dust such as cigarette smoke or oil-laden cooking fumes (my wife uses her laptop mostly in the kitchen) Other than that.... significant mass, spinning that fast. Interesting gyroscopic effects to say the least.