AirJet – Solid-state chip for active device cooling
froresystems.com
froresystems.com
To put this in perspective, with this and TSMC matching towards 14A / 1.4nm we could have machine that is roughly 2X the performance of Macbook Pro with M2 Pro at the thickness and size of MacBook Air by the end of this decade.
I am also hoping this will be more reliable than current Fanless cooling solution which tends to degrade after a few years.
What do you mean by that? I've had both PCs and laptops that were completely passively cooled and there was never any degradation.
Lots of different cooling solutions, the issue is there isn't a perfect one that works for all wattage while having no drawbacks. Either it's excessive noise, limited performance, large size, high price, complicated maintanance and so on.
The lofty claims they make are suspicious, I want to see this in action on a high performance chip without any other cooling.
Thermal expansion/contraction between cooler and chip itself "pumps" out the thermal paste which over time degrades cooling performance. If the system is running 24/7 its probably not as noticeable because you don't get the frequent heating/cooling you'd see on a device that gets power cycled often.
Nothing a repaste job wont fix.
Edit: to answer my own question it looks like Apple uses thermal paste but the cooling in the M2 MacBook Air looks extremely flimsey to the point of being almost non-existent. I doubt it will be affected much at all by this.
E.g. https://thermalmanagement.honeywell.com/us/en/products/therm...
Yes. Glue. Paste is for when you might want to one day separate part from heatsink. If you don't care about repairs, it is perfectly reasonable to just glue them together with thermal adhesive.
That is already available and used in some Laptops. Look up Honeywell thermal pad.
The problem is as always, cost.
The immediate thought looking at the design was "this probably has lots of tiny little channels, and those channels are going to get clogged with dust."
Time will tell, I'm happy someone is pursuing this either way.
besides compiling code, training models, or rendering videos, what else really benefits from this level of performance increase? like what "need" is there at consumer/professional levels? obviously better efficiency is always good for a ton of reasons. just curious if there's a "need" where we are wishing "man, wish CPUs/GPUs were 2x as fast!"
what doors does this open that aren't already open? i feel like i wouldn't really notice if my CPU doubled performance wise tomorrow.
Oh, and gaming of course. Which has driven most consumer level performance improvements. Laptops haven't gotten 4k gaming sorted yet and already people talking about 8k.... and have you seen the size of the newest NVidia cards? Literally the size of a brick and often in need of scaffolding due to the weight.
I don't think, Apple will sit idle until then.
"The first ever solid state thermal solution" "Inside AirJet are tiny membranes that vibrate at ultrasonic frequency"
How is it solid state if it has moving parts?
This is more like a one part cast/deposited with some degree of elastic deformation.
Supposedly a lot more reliable.
Not in my book. The first thing that comes to my mind when I hear "solid-state" and "cooling" in a sentence is "peltier element". The name "AirJet" gave it already away though, that this is likely something different.
They mention that those are MEMS membranes in the presentation [1]. But it also sounds like Airjet developers (or marketers) count MEMS membranes as solid-state, and piezoelectric fans as not, while I wonder where the line is.
This video was really insightful, thanks. Especially interesting was, that they use an effect called jet impingement that is also used in jet engines.
> "But it also sounds like Airjet developers (or marketers) count MEMS membranes as solid-state, and piezoelectric fans as not, while I wonder where the line is."
I think I can imagine where this distinction comes from. MEMS devices can usually be manufactured in facilities and with materials and processes very similar to those used for producing semiconductor chips like processors. Piezoelectric elements, on the other hand, require special materials and their production doesn't fit very well into the common semiconductor manufacturing process. Now, the step to call everything traditional semiconductor industry related "solid-state" is not that big.
Silicon crystals are naturally solid-state, car batteries and most can capacitors are liquid-state with their electrolyte, leaving many vacuum tubes no other choice but to be gaseous-state.
Now these air chips don't have any electrolyte so that rules out liquid, and all the components are solid materials so the component itself is actually solid-state, and so are other MEMS devices, even though they have moving parts.
Like an electric motor which is just iron, copper, and steel, a key solid-state electrical component.
It's still just a motorized fan.
Three states of matter is basically a fairy-tale we use as a first, easily understandable basic working model of matter. In reality there are so many states that Wikipedia has a dedicated page to list them: "List of states of matter" [1]
This is also the reason why every physicist cringes when the usual popular science mags announce the discovery of "a fourth state of matter" about once every year.
> "Silicon crystals are naturally solid-state"
Solid room temperature silicon can be in a crystalline state or an amorphous state. While amorphous silicon may appear solid it has many properties of a liquid and thats where the word "liquid" in LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) comes from. So, its not that easy.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_of_matter
I'm trying to narrow it down to the obvious choices ;)
Physicists are the experts on this kind of thing and I just go along with the choice they made when they started calling electronic components "solid-state" to begin with.
My apologies for being so controversial.
Other than electrolytic capacitors, both peripherals are electrically solid-state.
Even the helium in some HDDs is for physical purposes, not as a gaseous electrical element.
Extending "solid-state" to mass storage devices that have neither a rotational device nor the necessary internal gap (air or partial vacuum) for either rotation or actuators feels natural…to me.
Why stop there, a servo with a piece of membrane would also be solid state.
Why stop there, a motor with a membrane..
This definition makes no sense to me.
The above are electromechanical parts. Piezos are somewhat an exception because electricity directly leads to a parts deformation without magnetic field moving a component of that part in an electric field. In fact a piezo is just one part with two contacts.
>Why stop there, a servo with a piece of membrane would also be solid state.
>Why stop there, a motor with a membrane..
>Piezos
All Correct.
Even when they are electrically powered, hydraulic and pneumatic servos are not usually liquid-state or gaseous-state electrical devices except for any vacuum tubes or electrolytic components.
When the electricity flows only through solid materials like copper, carbon, or silicon, and doesn't (intentionally) flow across things like liquids, air gaps, or evacuated spaces, that's solid-state.
(1) The gaseous / solid meaning relevant for tubes vs. transistors.
(2) The mechanical / no moving parts meaning.
Two examples of devices that use the second meaning:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_storage
The SS in SSD means it doesn't have moving parts (platter, head) like a hard drive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_relay
The SS in solid state relay means it's not electro-mechanical like a relay.
In this case (the cooling chip), the second meaning is obviously the correct one because it is being compared to fans, which have moving parts.
Says who?
[0] https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/6387c57559192a648478384e/638...
1: https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/6387c57559192a648478384e/638...
1. high frequency stuff to drive this thing might make noise an issue. 2. wouldn't it have to be integrated into the chip your cooling to optimize the effectiveness? 3. the wording leads me to believe their "performance" is cooling to noise ratio and not just cooling.
IDGAF about noise as long as it doesn't sound like in a server closet, i just want to keep things under 90c with a margin for hot days, crapped out a/c.
this is just a solid state fan. cool for sure, potentially very useful (industrial/embedded will probably love it), but marketing needs to calm down.
In the 'how airjet works' video, they say a 50W processor is throttled to 10W and airjet brings it up to 20W so it's a 100% performance improvement for the processor.
Its more like the processor is only 60% worse and not 70% worse
I broke the fans in my laptop through overzealous cleaning and when I turned them off completely to not hear the rattling the laptop generally still worked - just forget about any heavy tasks. CPU: AMD 4800HS.
Peltier coolers have been around a while, but aren't very efficient. How's this compare?
To add, I'm wondering about the susceptibility of such a system to the use of things like compressed air. High-velocity particulate + tiny spaces = potential for jamming/destruction of the components?
Never mind that, this might be what’s needed to create a 1” thick Core i9-xx900HX 8” desktop replacement class UMPC that will most certainly be a worthy replacement, assuming they certify it with thunderbolt 4.
Isn't it possible to open it up and replace the fan with a Noctua?
They were kind enough to ship the backplate to my motherboard, even though that should have come with the board originally.
I'm glad I could find something that might help me run a quieter home server. Really appreciate their support.
On the whole this idea doesn't seem like it's going to do much for laptops now that Arm is entering the scene. Maybe it'll make a good solution for noisy graphics cards.
"Solid State Active Cooling Could Revolutionize Thermals"
I can't wait to get a thousand of them and build a silent vacuum cleaner.
Problem is I can't even talk to manufacturers at my volumes, and this probably won't be on Digi-Key/mouser/RS etc for years.
If I were them I would get these out to us little guys through those distributors so more engineers in general are familiar with them.
However there are watch people using silicon as balance replacement, so perhaps its more robust than I thought.
[0]https://www.buildcomputers.net/power-consumption-of-pc-compo...
Intel has been showing off "laptop" chips that are faster than Apple's. I put "laptop" in quotes because Intel often benchmarks their 45W "laptop" processors that would never fit in anything like a MacBook Pro or most other laptops.
Still, I'm sure Apple would love to be able to increase the thermal limit on their designs. Maybe even an iPad Pro could accommodate one of these (it looks like they're around 2mm thick).
Apple has done wonders to create processors that work extremely well within low power/heat constraints. I still think they'd love to be able to remove more heat and give them more room for their designs.
The main point being, out of all the laptops out there, I thought it was entertaining that they picked the one high-performance laptop brand I am familiar with that does not get hot when I use it.
It's like saying processing speed is a solved problem. Engineers/scientist don't have any problems finding productive ways to use more processing speed.
I am actually at a loss for words. So I'll ask a question instead.
Do you really believe what you just said or do you have no clue how CPUs work and passive cooling works?
Apple can easily license or buy from them which is what they do with other tech. Apple does not make OLED panels themselves nor do most that use OLED panels in their products.
Depends for who. If you are inventor, you can sell your invention and then go on working on your next invention without worrying about cash instead of trying to be a businessman doing business.
Either way we'd have to wait till people in industry get their hands on test models