Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Sandia's Floating, Dust-Free, Spinning Heatsink

Posted by samzenpus on from the cooler-cool dept.

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)."

5 of 307 comments (clear)

  1. Thousandth of an inch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Thousandth of an inch by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You must be a hard drive hater.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    2. Re:Thousandth of an inch by ackthpt · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --

      A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    3. Re:Thousandth of an inch by gl4ss · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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!

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  2. Re:Geez, another duplicate? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

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