Comment That's nice... (Score 1) 19
...but does it have a point?
Product placement is present in both ads
That's literally the point of adverts man.
When they replace the order taker with a bot, the human is freed up for other tasks, such as unemployment.
FTFY
> the jet impingement thing. I assume that it reduces the thickness of the boundary layer
Probably, though the illustration reminded me of a Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube - not sure if that's the heat transfer principle but it sounds that way. After removing the heat from the chip surface, that is.
You could be right, but I was thinking more along the lines of thinning the insulating layer of air between the heat source and the air in the device. I don't think this is the same as a vortex tube; remember that gases act more and more like viscous fluids the smaller you go.
Maybe they can replace their vibrating membranes with MEMS devices witth sub-micron gaps to make it more solid state?
Being "solid-state" is not really a question of scale; it's not even a clearly defined term now that such things as MEMS exist. A transformer in an electrical substation has no moving parts. Is it solid-state? Obviously not. Personally I tend towards thinking about how many parts there are physically interacting with other parts: a quartz oscillator is solid-state, as is a PTC heating element. In any event, I don't foresee anyone etching millions/billions of MEMS mechanisms on a chip to move some air any time soon.
Work wirh BIOS vendors to occasionally kick the MEMS into reverse and eject a poof of nasty dust out the inlet from whence it came at 200 KPH.
Somebody somewhere will start claiming laptops are farting, you just know it.
Now this I can believe. I remember installing Lightsaber.app on a portable Mac with new-fangled accelerometers* and using the say command in Terminal.app via SSH to scare the shit out of people in the next room.
*IIRC the idea was to park the heads on the HDD - this was before SSDs were common - if the device was dropped.
Peltier cooling has been tried and found to be a non-starter. The problem is that they only move the thing that needs to be cooled a few millimetres; one is still left with the task of actually getting rid of the heat, which falls back to traditional heatsinks + fans. I saw people experimenting with such things - along with actual, honest-to-goodness evaporative coolers, i.e. miniature refrigerators - back in the early days of YouTube. The reason we don't see them now is that heatpipes were so much better.
Peltier devices are frankly terrible in terms of how much heat they can move for the amount of power they need. You can compare this with using mechanical devices (i.e. steam turbines and other heat engines) to extract power from a heat differential vs. using Seebeck devices. With our current technology they just work so much better than solid-state devices. The difference is significant enough for people (NASA I think) to seriously consider using Stirling engines, which have moving parts, over thermoelectric devices on space missions, despite the fact that one can't fix the former if it breaks down and the latter probably never would.
Just an aside... back in the really early days no-one needed to care about hot chips in laptops because they were basically tower cases with a handle attached. A little later on we were still using chips that gave off very little heat (386's didn't need any cooling at all, didn't they? I forget.)
When processing power started to really take off... again, no-one really cared because AT/ATX cases were roomy enough for air cooling and no-one expected desktop performance from a laptop** anyway.
Now we find ourselves in a situation where we're trying to cram a relatively modest thermal load into an increasingly small space. We're still using forced-air cooling because there's really nothing else better that can fit in the space we have.
**It's been said that the word "laptop" fell out of favour among marketing types at Apple because the metal cases often made them too hot to comfortably use as such. My PowerBook G4 could be very hot in the middle where the RAM slots were so I think there's a grain of truth there.
Solid-state does not mean "no moving parts". Bad, bad summary writer apparently didn't even watch the video...
This thing basically works in a similar way to piezoelectric aquarium air pumps: there's a membrane that vibrates and some kind of check valve to force air to move in one direction only. What is quite clever is the jet impingement thing. I assume that it reduces the thickness of the boundary layer to allow better heat transfer; I think Sandia labs used the same concept but in a different way and for a different type of cooler.
On the other hand, I'm not convinced by the dust mitigation. This thing seems like it would be very sensitive to dust, which means it needs much better filtration that traditional coolers. The company says there's a filter on the device itself, which is all well and good, but if needs to filter more and smaller dust particles it will clog more quickly (on top of being very small, looking at the video) and I don't see that working too well when you have to take the computer apart to clean it.
Also to go out on a limb here, I have the feeling that dogs and teenagers will absolutely hate these.
Very interesting concept (like those genuinely solid-state dehumidifiers for electrical cabinets) but I suspect it's not going to find many applications in cooling computers. I'm curious if it only works in a small range of atmospheric pressure; though if you take a MacBook to the top of Everest you'd probably be grateful for a little extra heat.
Oh the cost of power for yourself should be absolutely negligible. It adds up although with the proliferation of many devices. I know many people that leave their chargers always plugged in so I assume they will do the same with their "wireless charging" charger which should require even more power.
Inductive chargers don't work like that. The charger only 'wakes up' when a receiving device is detected. Similar case with wired ones. I mean, just think about it, if you had a charger that was pulling 5/10/15 watts from the wall and not putting it into a device the charger would be in flames before you knew it.
The past few phones that I've had all failed due to the physical connector on the charging port failing. Wireless charging is allowing my current phone to last longer.
Odd, that's never happened to me, though I did once see an old nokia with a small barrel connector that stopped working to do a buildup of fluff.
It would be interesting to compare the cost of needing to replace the phone sooner vs the cost of the extra power.
Qi is ~50% efficient but let's be honest: the cost of the electricity you put into your phone will never even come close to what the device itself costs. My iPhone's battery is around the 15Wh mark and electricity here is around 35p/kWh. A back of the envelope calculation says that you'd need to add another 3 years of life to make it worthwhile, assuming you use a full charge every single day and assuming your electricity is as expensive as ours.
The main selling point of wireless charging is convenience, but for me these new faster speeds aren't that important; my charger is built-in to the base of a bedside lamp (IKEA, around fifty quid I think) so I just put my phone/kindle down there when I turn in and it's full in the morning.
I suppose you're making your point... but why don't I see ads for any of this on youtube?
I've no idea either, because I have no interest whatsoever in the things that YouTube advertises. In fact, I've reported scam ads on many occasions but they still pop up. Not the stuff that I merely find objectionable - I can grudgingly tolerate that - but the scams that even the weak ASA would come down on like the proverbial tonne of bricks. Is Google trolling me on purpose?
If you're seeing those things my guess is because you are looking for those things elsewhere. I see tons of ads for music production software... because that's what I like.
That's the thing, I'm not seeking out this stuff. The ads I see have no relevance to the sorts of videos I subscribe to or search for on YouTube. I'm sure as hell not Googling for ways to reverse sight loss by sucking ice cubes in the morning, or heating an entire room using nothing more than a tea light and a terracotta plant pot.
I'm not kidding about that last part; those are things that I routinely see in YouTube adverts.
I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"
