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A startup’s cooling chip may surge processor power

allaboutcircuits.com

31–40 of 58 posts

Re: A startup’s cooling chip may surge processor power

#31
That’s one part of the problem..

Why not make cooling / heat dissipation part of the cpu?

You can have horizontal or vertical planes to guide the heat to the top or sides. chips are not 2D anymore, and this might allow for a slightly cooler core/inside temperature

Re: A startup’s cooling chip may surge processor power

#32

That’s one part of the problem.. Why not make cooling / heat dissipation part of the cpu? You can have horizontal or vertical planes to guide the heat to the top or sides. chips are not 2D anymore, and this might allow for a slightly cooler core/inside temperature

No way this can make economical sense. Every bit of wafer surface has much more value for transistors than improving thermal performance. The current state with a heat conductive plate atop of the silicon is certainly the best tradeoff, since thermal dissipation is the second most significant way to improve ship performance after actual transistors layout and conductivity.

Re: A startup’s cooling chip may surge processor power

#33
post #21

For some reason I thought battery life was more constraining than cooling in mobile devices?

Different constraints. Better cooling allows the processor to throttle less and achieve higher average performance, which incidentally would also reduce your battery life if you had the processor running at 100% load the whole time.

Higher performance finishes the race to idle quicker and thus counterintuitively saves battery.

Re: A startup’s cooling chip may surge processor power

#34
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different constraints. Better cooling allows the processor to throttle less and achieve higher average performance, which incidentally would also reduce your battery life if you had the processor running at 100% load the whole time.

Higher performance finishes the race to idle quicker and thus counterintuitively saves battery.

not at all: higher performance equals higher freq, which requires higher voltage. Power scales w/ frequency linearly and the with the voltage squared. Then any active cooling will have its own power consumption.

Best battery/power savings are achieved running as low as possible voltage for as high as possible frequency. At such voltages the CPUs/APUs are less likely to throttle to begin with.

Re: A startup’s cooling chip may surge processor power

#35
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are interested in cooling, I suggest that you replace your thermal paste. In my research I have found that the thermal paste is, paradoxically, the least thermally conducting part of a PC heat pipeline. So, use as little of it as possible, to avoid adding thickness. Or use one made of a metal alloy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdTsra-uLBI

Indium gallium dries out. It needs annual repasting. Also, using too much thermal paste is not an issue. What matters is mounting pressure and geometry. Replacing the bendy Independent Loading Mechanism (ILM) with an aftermarket square bracket. If you want to go further you can lap the IHS or even delid for direct-die cooling. Delid for liquid metal TIM in between the IHS and die made sense for a few years, but Intel…

I have liquid metal of 5y old and it's just as new - the thing does not 'dry out', but it can be pumped out during thermal expansion and contraction.

Re: A startup’s cooling chip may surge processor power

#36
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are interested in cooling, I suggest that you replace your thermal paste. In my research I have found that the thermal paste is, paradoxically, the least thermally conducting part of a PC heat pipeline. So, use as little of it as possible, to avoid adding thickness. Or use one made of a metal alloy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdTsra-uLBI

Aside from Indium Gallium paste drying out as another post mentioned, it also has significant downsides. A big one is that it's electrically conductive so if it gets on the motherboard or oozes off the cpu, it can short out things on the motherboard. Another one is that the gallium in liquid metal will react with metals like aluminum, copper, and nickel and over the long term might cause bad things to occur.

Gallium will not really react with Nickel, in the worst case it will be tarnished which has no measurable impact on the thermal conductivity. Also the metals don't dry out (as in evaporate), but they can be pumped out.

Re: A startup’s cooling chip may surge processor power

#38
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are interested in cooling, I suggest that you replace your thermal paste. In my research I have found that the thermal paste is, paradoxically, the least thermally conducting part of a PC heat pipeline. So, use as little of it as possible, to avoid adding thickness. Or use one made of a metal alloy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdTsra-uLBI

If this is true, why not have coolers built into the CPU? Like a block of metal attached? Is it a small improvement gained? Or manufacturing nightmare?

It's called direct die cooling and that's pretty much what happens in the laptops. The reason why the IHS was introduced some 20 years back was the cracking of the silicon while mounting a cooler on top of it was quite easy.

Re: A startup’s cooling chip may surge processor power

#40

Suspicously absent in the diagram.. dust and particles.. i guess its a closed inner air circuit transporting the heat towards some large scale shedding surface. Also, is this something similar to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venturi_effect ?

I went through their marketing materials and according to them, the flow is strong enough to allow putting a filter there.
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