On-Chip Liquid Cooling Permits Smaller Devices With No Heatsinks Or Fans

Posted by samzenpus on Monday October 5, 2015 @07:15AM from the small-and-cool dept.

An anonymous reader writes: DARPA-funded research into on-chip liquid cooling has resulted in a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) liquid-cooled device that can operate at 24 degrees Celsius, versus 60 degrees Celsius for an equivalent air-cooled device. The cooling fluid resides only nanometers from the heat it must address, and operates so efficiently as to offer potential to stack CPUs and GPUs using copper columns, as well as dispensing with heat-sinks and fan systems. With those components removed, the system can facilitate far more compact designs than are currently feasible.

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reLOCATES the heatsink and fans by pla · 2015-10-05 07:34 · Score: 5, Insightful

Liquid cooling, no matter how efficient, still requires you to dump the waste heat somewhere. You don't magically get to just seal up the vents in the case because "liquid!".

That said, yes, this counts as a very cool (no pun intended) step forward, and will vastly improve the number of transistors we can pack into an arbitrary sized box - But make no mistake, that "savings" comes at the cost of needing an external radiator.

TANSTAAFL.