The Science of Keeping Your Chips Cool: Hot Chips, Cool Tricks

[Quixotic]

Great article. I have used peltiers and they are very effective in creating a delta T. You just need the extra power they demand as you point out.

 

[Loadedaxe]

An excellent article which started me thinking after reading these two quotes:

"We can't make CPUs and GPUs much bigger because there is no good way to cool something that powerful. " ""There's no way to actually get rid of heat, so all we can do is move it somewhere that it won't be an issue."

It seems to me that much of the problem the world is facing today comes from that attitude. Many processes create heat which is then 'vented 'to the atmosphere, raising the ambient temperature of the world itself and contributing to the various problems that causes.

If we would change our basic mode of thinking, rather than just rolling down a window and throwing stuff out, perhaps heat problems could be solved by a 'direct at base of flames' solution.

In the case of CPU coolers for computers, if the heat from the CPU was captured by a cooler and converted directly into electricity, it could then be routed back into the mainboard's circuitry.

That is essentially the concept that is used with modern home heating furnaces. There is very little heat which escapes from the exhaust of such a furnace.

I'm no thermal genius, but I love where your thinking is headed. Right now, the way we deal with heat is basically just "get it out of the way and hope for the best." There are devices like thermoelectric generators that can turn heat into electricity, but to my knowledge, they're still pretty clunky and not really efficient....especially with the kind of temps you get off a CPU.

But ...... like you, I think if we treated heat like a bonus resource instead of just a problem to dodge....what if more innovation went into capturing and recycling that energy right at the source, we could change the game not just for computers, but for a lot of other tech too. Feels like the kind of investment the world could really use right now.

 

[Freddie159]

Great article. An interesting follow up would be the evolution of consumer pc HSF. From fin arrays to game changers like Zalman flower cooler to Cooler Master Hyper 212 to Noctua D14!

I'd also like to see something about the new 'pads' instead of the 'grease' we use now between the cpu and the 'cpu cooler'.

 

[madboyv1]

Man that socket 939 ASRock board... recognized just about everything on it, we had it all back in the day. Ports and headers for days, PCIe-SLI and AGP, dual PATA slots and FDD alongside SATA II... A "budget sheep in wolf's pelt", though you lost two SATA ports if you wanted to each of the two e-sata ports in the back... but this thing was what, 2005-2006?

Nostalgia glasses are extra thick for me on that era of personal computing.

 

[casteve]

Thanks for the article. In practice, leakage current increases with temperature. Also, the best thing to remember as you try to keep your CPU cool is it's power use is proportional to frequency * (core voltage)^2. So, increasing the core voltage to get a little more frequency out of your cpu is the overwhelming contributor to higher power consumption -> heat.

 

[p51d007]

Excellent article!

 

[Gregtombstone]

As a retired power supply design engineer I think I coined the term "heat spreader" around 1979. I was designing encapsulated (epoxy potted) power modules and started using the term to describe my heat sink solution. The heat spreaders were used in production.

Later, I invented a thermal interface that was many times better than thermal compound.

Which was ?