GE develops ultra-thin, almost-silent cooler for next-gen laptops and tablets | Hacker News Reader

GE develops ultra-thin, almost-silent cooler for next-gen laptops and tablets

extremetech.com

60 pointsSelfcommit17 comments

Looks cool, but how does it differ from this - http://www.murata.com/products/micromechatronics/index.html ?

The inlet and outlet direction, and it's size. The GE ones are roughly 6cm x 6 cm. These murata ones are 2cm by 2cm.

http://www.digikey.ca/product-search/en?FV=fff40012,fff80051...

Damn, I think I found myself a christmas present. Pity it's so small though. I'll have to look at some numbers and see if it's good enough to cool a desktop's cpu heat sink.

I assume though that this doesn't help with the issue of exchanging the air inside the chassis. For that you still would need fans, else these new component coolers would just suck back in the hot air they expelled.

Maybe they need to install multiple coolers in a sequence to the entry of the exhaust and intake? So its like you have a guided air flow with these coolers as boosters to push air in 4 possible directions to the exhaust port.

Manufacturers will probably have to make sure the chassis of the gadget is air tight to increase efficiency.

I'm (still) hoping that next-gen laptops and tablets won't need any fans (or "almost silent" coolers). My tablet is already completely fanless and quiet, and so is my Dell Mini 9 ...

Laptops should still have fans for when they're plugged in and have the power available to ramp up clock speeds.

Then why shouldn't tablets, or phones?

I feel adding fans to a tablet or phone would somewhat defeat the goal of a small, portable computing device as fans need space. We'll always have the tradeoff between computing power and size, and tablets and phones favor the size side.

Well, for starters, tablets and phones aren't generally equipped with connectors and cables that can supply enough power. Charging over USB limits you to 25W at most, but laptops generally come with power bricks to supply two or three times that, and desktop-replacement notebooks go much higher than that.

Exactly. We already have silent and fanless tablets so I'm not sure why GE would be so troubled to get "almost silent" coolers.

How can the Dell Mini 9 be fanless, though? I don't think any Atom processor besides the smartphone-only Medfield is fanless. My old EeePC is also quite noisy when loading stuff, and it gets quite hot, too.

Some of us want the highest performance CPU and GPU possible in our laptop, but that requires a fan, but a silent fan would be a real value add over the current ones. Personally I'm happy to hear this, hope it makes it way into production laptops soon.

The Dell Mini 9 had an Atom N270, which is rated at 2.5W max. TDP: http://ark.intel.com/products/36331/Intel-Atom-Processor-N27...

There are (or were) plenty of fanless designs around that CPU on the market, from embedded/industrial PCs to nettop barebones, ITX mainboards and "panel computers" (i.e. early tablets).

For a data point, my home server is a fanless Atom D2700.

I ran a Dell Mini 9 for years, and loved that it had no moving parts (SSD, no fan).

I replaced it with a MBA 13, and I was shocked after 6 months when a firmware update made the fan come on. Before that, I didn't even know it had a fan.

I wonder how the vibration will work out. I'm sure they have it figured out on new installations, but what happens after a crumb or dust bunny gets wedged up against one side of this thing; or after it gets a bit off-balance.

Does this still work when it has a few pieces of dust stuck inside? They take up space and make noise, but fans seem like they'd be a lot safer unless you're filtering air on the way in.

Thank you GE, wait for the Chinese version to come out, who knows they would be already shipping them on mainstream products.

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