What is Digg?56 Comments
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -4/+92Sweetie, I hate to break it to you, but Apple and IBM got a divorce. They're still going to be your mommy and daddy, but they're not going to live together anymore. You can visit one on the weekends, but you're going to have to pick one of them to live with.
- GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -5/+22Silly bit is Apple abandoned IBM just as she was getting herself in shape. Her new Cells are far superior to her old units. Personally I feel IBM is better off now.
- rkuchiki, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14@vmerc
Learn to read, and you'll notice the "her" is IBM. - Recuso, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11If you had bothered to read it properly yourself, you'd have seen the words directly after the line you quoted:
"The results are quite impressive. Paste thickness could be reduced by a third, and the pressure required to properly fit a CPU cooler on top of a core was cut in half. All of this, and IBM says that cooling capabilities are effectively doubled. " - deviouskoopa, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11That was only one of many advantages outlined in the article, which I'm assuming you read by the quote you mentioned.
- clickwir, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9You are wasting time and money replacing it so often. It's not needed. Cleaning the dust is another issue, but you don't need to remove the whole cooler for that.
- ray901, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10@ xobecide
"IBM still has one of the most respected business laptops out there."
Which lap top is that?
Lenovo are now the makers of Thinkpads (Lenovo are a Chinese company) - stuntant, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9You should really change it once a day. You don't want to wind up in an ambulance with dirty thermal paste.
- gsnedders, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9What does IBM have on the laptop side, though? Nothing. If desktops were the only concern (which make up < 50% of Apple's sales of computers, FYI) there would be no issue with staying with IBM.
- Fordi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Hey, since when was IBM a woman? You gotta figure, with its design focus, Apple's the chick.
- clickwir, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5They mention that this process would be done to the top of the CPU......... why not just do it to the bottom of the heatsink.... that way we could all have the benefit with just replacing the heatsink and not having to replace the whole CPU?
Maybe I missed that part. - GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@Fordi
Who said it wasn't a girl on girl thing. - troyallen069, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Microsoft doesn't make PCs
- schoate09, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7It'd be hillarious if Microsoft, Dell and all adopt PowerPC, and PPC then beats the ***** out of Intel like Intel did when Apple had PowerPC.
Cause, I honestly miss watching Mac Fanboy's defend their once inferior hardware. - gsnedders, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5MS _did_ try and get corporate users to adopt PPC in the '90s, and shipped several releases of Win NT for PPC. For almost the entirety of the '90s PPC chips could outperform x86 chips. PPC remains the better design, and x86 is only truly faster because so much money has been shoved into developing it.
- xixor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@ray901,
The Thinkpad series still are still sold as "IBM Thinkpad", not "Lenovo Thinkpad" (check the Lenovo website) and they are still some of the best business and professional notebooks around. The T60, X60, X60s, X60 tablet and others are absolutely solid devices. - steelmaverick, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6@ray901
OMG....Nooo...turning into...grammar nazi.....GAAAHHH
Lenovo IS NOW THE maker of THE Thinkpad (Lenovo IS a Chinese company).
Whooo....calm down now.... - Azuroth, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Because what you see as the "top" of your CPU is actually the top of the heat spreader. Think of it this way: CPU -- heat spreader -- heat sink/fan. (each of the -- is a layer of thermal paste)
That said, I wonder if this applies equally to the heat spreader -- heat sink layer. Maybe mirrored heat sinks aren't as good as we thought? - SanTe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@xixor:
The last few shipments of Thinkpads I've received don't have "IBM" anywhere on them. They are Lenovo branded, at least the T60s are anyway. - scthk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Did anyone read the article?
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2From what I've heard, the most metal to metal surface area contact the better. Thermal paste should only be used to fill in microscopic gaps where the metal doesn't contact each other perfectly. This is why heat sinks need to be lathed (sp?) to an almost mirror finish for better results.
Isn't this then just a matter of people spattering on way too much thermal paste where it's not needed? - chaos7, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2cool maybe they'll use it on video cards..i don't like noisy fans on them
- cowabuse, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The other day I removed like a quarter inch of dust off of my heat sink. You should really clean the area between your fan and heat sink thats on top of the processor. My fans are a lot quieter now.
- Ulvund, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The article is definately female
- binaryspiral, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This still doesn't fix the problem of actually generating more heat with slightly more performance improvements... A 1U server now puts out more heat than a 6U did five years ago... sure it's a bit faster, but man, we're running out of places to put A/C units for our equipment! :-)
- Gizza, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Well, from the little I understand about thermal pastes is that it can take a few weeks before it actually reaches its full potential. Meaning that by replacing it every 6 weeks you are probably in fact making things worse.
- dredwolff, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1hey, not bad, or you could take that one step further and use manmade diamonds as a heatsink, they're supposed to be 10 times better at conducting heat than copper, and getting cheaper every day.
- Ulvund, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I can't spell
- Jahz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@smb3d
"can you really call a groove cut into a piece of metal "technology"? I could be wrong but I'm not sure if you can even license such a thing."
Call it whatever you want. Providing nobody has done this before, IBM can patent this idea and the resulting manufacturing process. Patents can be licensed. Therefore, the answer is yes, IBM can license this (and make money from it).
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/doc/general/index.html#patent
"1) Utility patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof;
2) Design patents may be granted to anyone who invents a new, original, and ornamental design for an article of manufacture"
I think this fits #2 better, but works for both. - S1ngular1ty1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Actually skyshock21 was right.
Metal to metal contact is preferred over thermal paste when possible. The problem is that metal surfaces are not normally smooth and so when you put two metal objects together they only contact at high spots due to the metal asperities. Thermal paste fills in these voids between the two metal pieces to provide a thermally conductive path since an air gap would have a very high thermal resistance. Since thermal paste is usually much less thermally conductive than metal, you want the thermal paste thickness to be as small as possible to reduce the conduction resistance.
The other problem with thermal paste, as mentioned in the article, is that the thermally conductive particles in the paste (which isn't so thermally conductive) are not usually dispersed uniformly. Therefore, where the particles clump together you get very good cooling and places in the paste where the particles are fewer you get greatly reduced cooling.
IBM's idea is pretty ingenious to solve these problems. The microscopic grooves they propose apparently help to control the spreading of the paste and the paste thickness so that the thermal resistance is greatly reduced. - plamia, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0Impossible! Things never change.
- Tochi, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Your way is also overkill.
- S1ngular1ty1, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1You obviously have no technical background and that is why you are doing stupid things like removing the cooler to clean it so often.
- gesturemaker, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0Quite doubtful. My dog loves it :)
- Jahz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0"Isn't this then just a matter of people spattering on way too much thermal paste where it's not needed?"
No. It's about increasing the efficiancy of the buffer zone between chip and heat dissipator by optimizing the thermal paste application. Hence heat can be pulled from the die more efficiantly and thus potentially require less work to cool. - steelmaverick, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Ignore him. He's obviously never attended a Chemistry 101 class. Shame.
- Jahz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0IBM is probably trying to get laptop manufacturers to pressure AMD/Intel into licensing this technology by revealing it. The potential to "double" laptop cooling efficiancy is very appealing.
My MacBook Pro is currently spinning two silent fans at 2000 RPM and maintaining ~53C (the ambient temp here is rather high). If this new tech is truly so efficiant it would mean I could potentially maintain the same fan speeds but reduce the machine temp to just a few degrees above ambient. The result would obviously be a modest improvement in battery life for an idling laptop. - humanseemer, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Wow, this is a really good idea, I myself have seen the "magic cross" when removing HSFs from processors. I wonder why nobody else has thought of this?
- insomuchas, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2Blowing compressed air doesn't do as good a job as washing the whole thing down in alcohol either.
Air leaves residue which builds up the dust faster.
My way is best. - Paraxitic, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0The channels are put in at the bottom of the heatsink. That's what the picture tells me.
- Jahz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0@ThinkRad
"Perhaps we'll keep this to ourselves for awhile and leverage as a way to make the PowerPC chip viable again(!?) RISC FTW"
No... I don't think IBM really cares about that so much. PowerPC is an Apple thing, IBM offers *some* computers with that they call the POWER platform. Without Mac OS X, POWER only supports AIX officially. IBM offers *more* workstations that run AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon than those that are based on POWER. Their mid-range server offerings are pretty evenly split between POWER and AMD/Intel.
POWER is RISC, true... but that isnt really what makes it special. RISC isn't inherently faster than CISC in a modern machine, its just different. POWER's strength is in the industry leading on-die vector processing unit. Only specialized software needs powerful vector processing, namely CAD suites like the ones used to design airplane frames, cars and carbon-fiber hockey sticks (no joke). In fact, the IBM even doesn't even market their POWER workstation as a "workstation". They call it an "Engineering Design Workstation".
Part of the reason Apple and IBM parted ways was because the POWER arch is NOT the chip for the modern Mac. When Apple was tar getting only specialized professionals (like CAD, graphic and 3D designers) a chip like PowerPC was perfect! Now that mom, dad and Joe Student are once again Apple's target audience, using an industrial chip really doesn't make any sense. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1You are just way too paranoid.... or are you just trying to pretend you're a computer expert?
- deviouskoopa, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3The "Gettin' groovy" pun located underneath figure 2 doubled the enjoyment of reading the article.
- smb3d, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1can you really call a groove cut into a piece of metal "technology"? I could be wrong but I'm not sure if you can even license such a thing.
- questionable, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0I thought IBM dumped Apple. What's the real story?
- raptordrew, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Wonder how long til third-party people perfect this?
- ThinkRad, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Abuse
- liuite, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0here is a no brainer; superior thermal conductivity using nanotechnology by efficiently aligning the graphite molecules
- ThinkRad, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0Perhaps we'll keep this to ourselves for awhile and leverage as a way to make the PowerPC chip viable again(!?) RISC FTW
- insomuchas, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1when you run an overclocked Prescott, you really have no choice. The heat sink has to be cleaned of dust regularly and that means taking it off the cpu.
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