Mobile processors with eight cores and over 2GHz are already a reality and they are becoming even more faster, but there is a problem faced with faster processors - cooling.
With the components tightly packed in the device, the heat becomes too much if the speed is increased beyond a limit, but research is going on and new ways to tackle the heat are being discovered, one such unusual sounding way is WAX.
A research being carried out in the University of Michigan is using a different approach to cooling, using wax to cool a desktop Core i7 processor.
As the processor is loaded, the extra heat generated melts the wax, at above 54°C. Once the processor is idle, the temperature goes down and the wax solidifies again.
The research group tested a Core i7 processor using Wax cooling up to 10 watts comfortably. They further think that the processors can do periodic "sprints" rather than "jogging" which they call "computational sprinting".
The i7 can be periodically boosted to up to 50watts in which the wax absorbs the heat and melts. But the periodic bursts cannot be performed again until the wax solidifies again.
The group thinks they can eventually improve the idea and make it usable for up to 100 watts of short burts. They think that the idea can be employed in smartphones one day, making them run faster for short burts.
The idea seems to be good and hopefully one day we will have another cooling technology.
But this is not arriving anytime soon and could take anywhere between five to ten years to be employed in smartphones.
Source
With the components tightly packed in the device, the heat becomes too much if the speed is increased beyond a limit, but research is going on and new ways to tackle the heat are being discovered, one such unusual sounding way is WAX.
A research being carried out in the University of Michigan is using a different approach to cooling, using wax to cool a desktop Core i7 processor.
As the processor is loaded, the extra heat generated melts the wax, at above 54°C. Once the processor is idle, the temperature goes down and the wax solidifies again.
The research group tested a Core i7 processor using Wax cooling up to 10 watts comfortably. They further think that the processors can do periodic "sprints" rather than "jogging" which they call "computational sprinting".
The i7 can be periodically boosted to up to 50watts in which the wax absorbs the heat and melts. But the periodic bursts cannot be performed again until the wax solidifies again.
The group thinks they can eventually improve the idea and make it usable for up to 100 watts of short burts. They think that the idea can be employed in smartphones one day, making them run faster for short burts.
The idea seems to be good and hopefully one day we will have another cooling technology.
But this is not arriving anytime soon and could take anywhere between five to ten years to be employed in smartphones.
Source
