A glimpse at next-gen cooling
BM’s Zurich Research Lab has announced a technology that it says imitates nature and increases the cooling properties of otherwise regular heatsinks by an impressive twofold.
One of the major challenges with cooling processors is designing effective units that can dissipate the heat, either through convection with heatsinks — passively or forced with fans — or through alternatives such as water cooling and thermoelectric Peltier systems.
The other challenge that is equally important is heat transference. This is often overlooked, however, as it’s difficult to improve upon with current processor heat-spreader designs. That is, efficiently moving the heat from the metal plate on top of the processor — the heat-spreader — over to the heatsink or whatever is cooling said chip, is quite challenging.
This is where IBM says it has a solution.
To encourage this transference, presently we use thermal paste — or what we elegantly like to call ‘goop’. This goop reduces the tiny imperfections of both surfaces to allow for better surface contact and permits slight movements due to expansion and contraction from the heat.
Many people swear by different types of thermal goop, however the performance differences generally come down to a margin of error, but that which still barely changes by a degree Celsius or two. Vegemite and grainless toothpaste would be similarly useful if it weren’t for their delicious properties.
This paste is ’smooshed’ — another fine technical term — between the processor and the cooling unit. It usually involves a business card, patience, and a firm hand to spread just the right amount evenly across the entire surface.
While spreading on the paste, one must be careful not to leave too much on the surface so as to inhibit its heat transference properties, but not too little for it to be of hardly any benefit.
Yes, with all this goop smooshing going on, it is by no means an exact science.
This all changes, according to IBM, with its new design of heat-spreader it lovingly calls ‘high thermal conductivity interface technology.’ Addressing the transference point where the processor and cooling unit meet, it says the powerful design has taken a page or three from biology.
This design consists of a hierarchical structure of channels on the processor, like tree roots, that ensure the goop is much more evenly distributed across the two conjoined surfaces. The end result is a near-perfect connection with a thermal paste thickness of merely 10 micrometres.
This, claims IBM, increases the transference efficiency a fair and reasonable tenfold.
IBM also spoke of a similar, albeit closed-water system comparable “to the human vascular system.” It contains 50,000 tiny channels fashioned in a tree-branch hierarchy and can cool a remarkable 370W per square centimetre. This system uses much less power to pump the liquid than existing cooling systems, it says.
Basically, there is a flicker of hope for our oncoming 6000 degree processor overlords.
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