Slashdot Mirror
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)."
There's an article?!
So are you implying that the editors aren't nerds?
That's amazing!
Hey, everyone! We landed on the moon!!
Why not keep the fans still and instead rotate the cpu ? Spinning the whole computer at 2000 rpm would also help with ventilation...
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!
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.
Someone had to do it.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
... it spins @ 1.75 kRPM.
That extra 250 RPM does the trick!
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Does it yelp like when you kick a dog?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
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?
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/