If I had just invented this, I would want to show it off with a demo attached to a CPU showing actual heat dissipation.
I would have two laptops side by side, with motherboards exposed running some benchmark, and prove that my cooling solution could move more heat, be quieter, be smaller, or some combination of those things.
The fact it is demo'ed just as a fan is in my mind suspicious.
I'm really curious about these will fare through fire season. Fans get gunked up annually despite (low quality) filters on the case intakes and HEPA filters on my furnace/ac intake. I suspect that if you can't clean these cooling chips, they'll be garbage within a couple of years.
According to the video, their system produces higher static pressure. This means that you can install better filters for air input/output on the laptop.
The founder mentions the dust proofing as a nice side effect of the high back pressure, but I'm wondering if that might actually be necessary to prevent the mechanical membranes from getting jammed with gunk and failing over time.
I have first seen this tech demonstrated in 2012, but apparently the idea dates at least as far back as the early 2000s or even the 80s (EDIT: the 80s ones I had in mind were probably different). I was pretty hyped for it back then, but there have been barely any mentions of it since. Let's see if it actually makes it out of the lab this time, and if it actually delivers.
The founder of this company claims that the air speed is 120km/h in a PC-World video interview. It is surprising with such high airspeed that this device is "quiet". Is it possible that most of the sound energy is ultrasonic which is why they state their noise level as 21dBA and not 21dB ? From my understanding dbA is weighted according to human hearing. Your dog might hate this invention.
It can mean "single part", "no change in points of contact", "non-moving", "not liquid", "no liquids or gases", "no atomic displacement", "ideally no atomic displacement", and several other things. Worse yet, people often change the meaning between sentences of the same document.
A lot of times it's used to say no parts that move or slide relative to eachother. Things like piezo transducers and DLP mems chips are still considered solid state. Certainly a fuzzy line at best
Solid state originates in solid state physics, as opposed to physics involving liquids or gases. The MEMS on the device are moving due to solid state physics.
But by that argument a traditional spinning fan is solid state, since the fan is solid rather than gaseous/liquid as well. Same for a spinning hard drive.
Common modern usage of "solid state" in electronics seems to be synoymous with "no moving parts", not solid as opposed to liquid/gas.
Vibration is kind of an edge case though, so I'm not really sure. There's an expectation that solid state components don't usually fail mechanically or need maintenance in that department. I wonder what the lifetime is for this type of vibrating component?
Yes, that's true. Electromagnetics are part of solid state physics. I think there is a tradition to it too, as solid state electronics came to be about semiconductors, and I think still to this day, solid state has that connotation. For that reason I see no problem in calling this a solid state device.
A hunk of metal doesn't cool anything, it just moves the heat from one place to another until you reach equilibrium, then you have "zero cooling" again.
It does. The hunk of metal has more surface area than the processor, more surface to radiate, conduct, and convect the heat away. It doesn't matter if you use metal or water to move the heat to the air, your still sinking it to the air, hence the name heat sink. So a hunk of metal does cool things, it cools things better if you add more surface area by adding fins.
Giving you time for the CPU not to melt and shutdown the computer? Is thermal management clever/fast enough to do this on modern CPUs without any heat sink at all? Also I wonder about the failure rate of such a device. Very interesting though.
Depends on how much the CPU can lower power consumption.
With Intel parts you can run them with no cooler, they'll just throttle to maintain 100 °C by default (exactly like in laptops). Not every motherboard allows this though, some will start beeping angrily when PROCHOT is asserted or reset.
With Ryzens it depends, the chiplet ones can't do it, because the IOD power consumption exceeds what the IHS can dissipate without a cooler, so no matter what the CPU power management does, it will always eventually shut off. If you're in OC mode, it will do so at 115 °C. The APUs can probably do it, they'll probably be faster than Intel because they're more efficient.
I wonder if this would make sense for smartphones. There are already some gaming-oriented phones with fan attachments. This seems better than that (unless your goal is to look conspicuously gamer-y).
I looked at this tech a while back. While it's cool the performance vs fans wasn't anything to write home about. I hope that has changed. We desperately need better cooling.
Depends on whether their statements about using high pressure to scrub off the thin layer of warmer air right next to the heat sink are accurate. If so it could have significantly better cooling performance for a given CFM.
It could still be useful even if the performance isn't much better than a fan. If you retrofitted on of these into an M1/M2 MacBook Air for instance it'd be enough to keep the CPU from throttling under extended loads without sacrificing its original silent nature or making its bottom surface unsuitable for lap use, which is pretty cool.
They remove heat by blowing the air over the flat surface. Looking at presented designs there is no way they would have enough of that flat surface area to remove all that heat. Does not matter how much air they would blow over that tiny surface. Traditional solutions involve gobbles of thin ribs with huge surface area that simply dwarves what they're proposing (I am not mentioning liquid cooling here as in the end it still ends up with the ribs). Clogging would be a problem as well but I guess it will not come to this stage as it would melt CPU first ;)
The article has a case study suggesting that is not true. It also says that real laptops with this are due this year. It also has an explanation of why it can extract more heat from a smaller surface area than a traditional heatsink in the video. The diagram says 'flowing air reaches the same temperature as the heat spreader' so this is apparently not a limitation at all.
Of course, who knows if all these things are true, but this is a shallow dismissal.
>"The diagram says 'flowing air reaches the same temperature as the heat spreader'
So both will happily stay at CPU melting point.
They say that - "The Mini can dissipate up to 5 Watts of heat, while the larger Pro models can dissipate up to 10 Watts." which is definitely not enough to run performance laptops on sustained load.
>"but this is a shallow dismissal."
See the above. I think it is not dismissal that is shallow.
The PCWorld video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGxTnGEAx3E) discusses how a vapor chamber should be used between the heat source and the cooler to distribute heat evenly to the device. And that performance laptops are targeted for future generations of device, requiring upwards of 100 watts of cooling.
I know how vapor chamber etc works what is your point? It all comes down to having X square centimeters to dissipate X watts at Z temperature and scaled to some number.
As for what they plan to have in the future - it will be believable when they show how they're going to achieve it
You can apparently cool better using this device than traditional fans and heatsinks. Per the video, the high velocity air hitting the cooling surface vertically at high speed is much more efficient at removing heat than low speed blowers, as it punches through the layer of insulating air that forms on the surface of traditional heat sinks and the air takes away heat at almost its maximum thermal capacity, so you need much less cooling surface area.
>"You can apparently cool better using this device than traditional fans and heatsinks"
Traditional fans and heatsinks have no problem dissipating 100's of watts. Wake me up when this contraption will do the same.
>"high velocity air hitting the cooling surface vertically at high speed is much more efficient at removing heat than low speed blowers"
Except that traditional blowers operate on immense surface are hence dwarf the efficiency of this gizmo. Anyways we do not have to agree. The future will tell. Wake me up in a year.
While it indeed has high static pressure, I believe the catch is that absolute amount of air (and hence power) moved is miniscule. It consumes 2 watts to move 10.
Looks impressive from a tech standpoint, but I wonder how reliable it is. Laptop fans do clog and fail and something with tiny vents like this would likely fare even worse. Though a manufacturer might end up speccing these anyways as they expect the laptop to only last 2-3 years...
This is common on desktops, but I've never seen a laptop with removable filters. Typically I have to perform a full teardown to clean out the integrated heatsink and vent.
I would have two laptops side by side, with motherboards exposed running some benchmark, and prove that my cooling solution could move more heat, be quieter, be smaller, or some combination of those things.
The fact it is demo'ed just as a fan is in my mind suspicious.