| Sumario: | A group of thermo-mechanical engineers at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, has been trying to stop chips from frying themselves, as part of an industry-wide effort to push the boundaries of high-performance computing. It is a pressing problem, because the latest Intel 64-bit processors are already generating a sixth of this figure. By 2005, the industry's most powerful processors will be running five to ten times hotter. Cooling chips that dissipate this much energy requires more than a bit of conduction and ventilation. Hollow heatpipes full of liquids with low boiling-points can cut the thermal resistance of heatsinks. Heatpipes work like miniature refrigerators: thermal energy is drawn out of the chip by allowing it to evaporate the liquid into a vapor, which then dumps the heat via cooling vanes into the outside world.
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