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Thursday, March 22, 2007
Next - water-cooled PCs
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This isn’t exactly news of the weird but it will tell you a lot about how far we are stretching today’s technology when it comes to PCs.
There’s a serious effort to sell a cooling device for the processor in your PC - it uses circulating water to pull the heat away from the processing chip.
The need and possible market for such a device - it’s supposed to be a Do-it-Yourself installation - shows what a big deal heat build-up is for home computers. As manufacturers have pushed for high and higher speeds, the temperature of the processor has zoomed up close to practical limits. Right now most processor chips are cooled with a fan but - as the ad at this link says correctly - water does a much better job. (Think of the cooling differences for air cooled and water cooled car engines).
While a notion like this may seem bizarre to some of you, it wouldn’t to ‘overclockers’ - folks who, often as a hobby, try to force existing chips to run faster than their rated speed. Doing this at real extremes has caused hobbyists to turn to all sorts of methods - including liquid cooling - to keep the chip from french frying.
My thought? Nah. While it’s an innovative sort of product it isn’t one for the mass market. The real hope for mass market home PCs is the use of multiple chips - or single chips with multiple processors - as is being done right now. That way you can run the processors at lower speeds for lower temperatures - but use the multiple processors to get better performance. It’s old hat technology, something mainframe computers have done for a long long time and a technique that PC makers are beginning to adopt.
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