Intel unveils new cooling tech for ultrathin laptops
Updated on October 24 at 10:20 a.m. with corrected image of Intel laminar jet technology.
Intel wants a laptop to live up to its name.
A computer that sits comfortably, coolly on your lap. The world's largest chipmaker expects a crush of ultrathin laptops from PC makers in 2009 and unveiled cooling technology this week to make sure these svelte air-flow constrained designs stay cool.
To date, cooling technology has focused on keeping the internal components from getting too hot but not the outside of the computer, according to Mooly Eden, general manager of Intel's Mobile Platforms Group, speaking at the Intel Developer Forum in Taipei this week. Eden's keynote was streamed from the event.
Intel uses laminar jet technology to cool a laptop's skin (corrected image)
(Credit: Intel)"When you design a very thin system, cooling the skin is a very big challenge," said Eden. "If you put (a laptop) on your lap, it can feel very uncomfortable. Very hot." This is one of the biggest hurdles to designing an ultrathin laptop like the MacBook Air or HP Voodoo Envy 133.
If this problem isn't solved, laptops "can't be made thinner and thinner," he said.
Eden showed an animation of a jet engine to prove his point. The inside of a jet engine can get as hot as 1,000 degrees centigrade. But the jet engine's wall must be kept cool because it is connected to the wing where the fuel is. To keep the engine heat away from the wing, laminar air flow cooling is used.
A laminar flow occurs when a fluid--or air in this case--flows in parallel layers.
Intel demonstrated a system using the same laminar air flow technology to move the heat off a laptop's skin. "We are licensing it to our customers so they can keep making thinner and thinner laptops," Eden said.
Intel demonstrated laminar jet cooling at IDF.
(Credit: Intel)Intel also revisited the next-generation Calpella laptop platform (due in the second half of 2009) based on its Nehalem technology. Eden reiterated that the graphics and memory controller would be integrated onto the same piece of silicon as the processor.
He also discussed how additional transistors in Nehalem can switch cores on and off, depending on how processor-intensive the application is. This will be critical in a quad-core Calpella laptop to deliver acceptable battery life. (Eden intimated that Calpella quad-core laptops would be common.)
For instance, three of the cores can be shut down to save power when the user is doing tasks that don't require a lot of compute power. Then more cores can be turned on depending on the need.
This is done "automatically on the fly. It is transparent to the operating system," Eden said.
He also talked about "Hyperthreading" or simultaneous multithreading on Nehalem--the ability to run two program threads simultaneously per each core, doubling the number of threads and, Intel claims, obviating the need for eight cores. "We could have done eight cores. We know how to do it. But it would have been too hot," he said.
Eden showed a concept Calpella laptop on stage during his IDF keynote speech.
Brooke Crothers has been an editor at large at CNET News, an analyst at IDC Japan, and an editor at The Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, among other endeavors, including co-manager of an after-school math-and-reading center. He writes for the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET. Disclosure. 
I'm leery of core throttling! In the car industry, turning off and on cylinders has produced some pretty poor performing engines, in fact even problematic. Will this be the case for throttable core technology too! Then there is the amount of delay that will occur when processor requirements jump suddenly! Will there be a noticeable lag in response time? Will Windows blue screen during that transition period? Since XP is still the preferred operating system from Windows, Intel should be testing this technology using it. If it works with Vista and not XP, I can guarantee it will not be successful because NOBODY wants Vista, in fact that name itself gives computer users a sour stomach just thinking about it! How will Apple OSX and Linux handle throttable cores? These questions have to be answered before Intel puts the product on the market. In a way AMD in quad core technology is well ahead of Intel, and this may give Intel an advantage in the laptop arena.
As far as super thin laptops are concerned, I have my doubts about their durability. My laptops have had large screens and a heavy chassis. These stand up to abuse that a laptop gets that desktop computers do not. Will the design of superthin laptops be sturdy enough? To date all the superthin laptops I've seen develop problems in strange areas, keyboard buttons failing, wireless cards mysteriously stopping their function, screen pivot failures. Then there is the hard drive issue, while flash EEPROM technology is nice, my experience with large flash drives is that they are SLOW! Hard drives have much faster read write function then a flash drive, especially in the area of large file transfers such as music and graphics applications! The current 2.5" perpendicular recording technology drives are to THICK currently to be used in a superthin laptop. Is Intel inventing a special hard drive for the design and is it going to be proprietary? How easy is it to damage the superthin LCD screen? One strike on the top in the right place could total it! How will you read CD/DVD's? Are they going to have a drive available for that? How delicate will that be? My current laptop is capable of reading any number of camera flash media and displaying the contents directly. Will you have to plug an external card reader in via Fire-wire or USB? Will the computer be thick enough to support USB connectors at all?
There is a lot more than cooling to consider when looking into a superthin laptop. Currently they just don't cut it for a power user such as myself. Until these issues are addressed I cannot even consider purchasing such a laptop, I wouldn't be able to trust it for reliability and flexibility.
- by EvanSei August 10, 2009 5:58 PM PDT
- my new acer has this technology in it and I can say from first hand experience it works, there is no comparison between the heat of my acer and my old hp, the acer even after running all day still feels cool to the touch over the entire body, yes even the underside, and boy is it quiet
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