 |
|
Amuse
Blogs
Food
Life
Links
News
Pictures
Rants
Site
Tech
Words
Via Engadget, I just read this very interesting article at ExtremeTech: a company called Novel Concepts is working on a heat-dissipating material that is only 500 microns thick and could be used to "skin" electronics and ultimately replace heat sinks and fans inside computers and other devices.
The benefits are myriad. The ability to keep microprocessors cool is a definite issue in the development of faster CPUs and computer design. If you've opened up a current-gen PC lately, you know that the thing that takes up the most room inside the case is the whopping great heat sink that has to sit on top of the CPU. That's a particular problem in laptops, where there isn't room for a toaster-sized heat sink assembly. Better heat dispersion would benefit form factor design and allow chipmakers to push CPU speeds even faster.
Then there's the issue of noise from fans. I used to support a user who had a ThinkPad with a fan so noisy it sounded like there was a small airplane revving its engine on her desk. I have gotten used to the white noise effect of having multiple computers running in my workspace all day, and almost never even notice the fan noise until they all power down and things go back to being genuinely silent. My own PC tower at home has dual fans for the motherboard AND a fan for the GPU on the graphics card (which is actually much noisier than the other two); I would kill for a little "silent running" in my den.
© BrianKaneOnline.com 2000-2007