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Hitachi Demos Water-Cooled Notebooks 218

Posted by timothy from the hissing-steam dept.
Sprocket writes: "Water-cooled processors, currently the domain of supercomputers, high-end servers, and garage hobbyists, may be about to enter the mainstream. Hitachi has developed a prototype notebook PC that uses a water-based solution to cool down its Pentium 4 processor and is planning to commercialize the product for corporate users in the third quarter of this year... read more"
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Hitachi Demos Water-Cooled Notebooks More

Hitachi Demos Water-Cooled Notebooks

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  • Hitachi has developed a prototype notebook PC that uses a water-based solution to cool down its Pentium 4 processor
    Doh!

  • a funny joke (Score:1, Funny)

    by flynt ( 248848 )
    Usually I'm worried about spilling water on my laptop. Now I have to worry about spilling water OUT of my laptop!
  • Wasn't the Dreamcast water cooled if I recall correctly?

    • Re:Water-cooled (Score:2, Informative)

      by cadallin451 ( 536419 )
      The original Japanese Dreamcast was. The American Dreamcast just had a fan. It still negates the point of this article though. Water cooling for consumer electronics has already happened and is, in fact, Old News.

    • Re:Water-cooled (Score:2, Interesting)

      by bobdole369 ( 267463 )
      I think the Dreamcast had a heatpipe. Lots of laptops have heat pipes (basically a tube under certain pressure and a bit of an angle with a few drops of water in it, in normal state it is liquid, that under heat cause the water to turn to vapor, migrate away from the heat source, evaporate and drip back down the tube into vapor again.) Not new at all, and very passive... Not actively pumped about like this is....

      • Of all the responses here, yours is the most correct. The first generation of Japanese-manufactured Dreamcast (made for the Japanese and U.S. markets) was cooled by a heat pipe and slow (quiet) metal fan. These models were considerably heavier than the later/non-Japanese-made models because of the weight of the heat pipe and fan. They also had more heat problems than later models, because they originally used an older, hotter-running rev of the Hitachi SH4.

        To complement the cooler SH4s, later models used light heat sinks and faster-spinning (louder) plastic fans. The drives were also different, causing minor differences in noise, compatibility, and reliability (none of which contributed to any cooling issues).

        In any case, you are right in that the "water cooling" done by the heatpipe was much more passive than Hitachi's method. It was so passive (and largely ineffective) that it was designed to augment the cooling effects of the fan, not replace the fan entirely.

        < tofuhead >

    • Yeah, I believe one of the special edition versions released in Japan was water cooled. Most of them were air cooled however.
      • Gez every 2nd laptop currently being made has a heatpipe - its no big deal

        "Heatpipes" [psc-cp.com] are nothing new.

        Although heatpipes are mainly utilised where things are cramped arround the heatsource, to move the heat to another spot where there's more room for a heatsink (hence its popularity in laptops, where they move the heat from the CPU to behind the screen, where there's room for a wide albit flat heatsink), there are a couple of Socket 7/370/A heatsinks that utilise the heatpipe effect. The "Zen Radiator" [overclockers.com.au], which uses the heatpipe as the core of a radiator like arrangement; & the "Coolermaster HHC-001 Heatpipe Copper Cooler" [plycon.com], which has long (as in high) fins & uses heatpipes to help conduct heat to the top of the fins.

        All this article shows is that PC World employs a laptop reviewer who doesn't know what he's talking about in regards to laptops.

        Really if a tech mag is going to have someone write a blurb about laptop cooling they should employ someone who actually knows something about laptop cooling.

    • Re:Water-cooled (Score:2, Insightful)

      by VPN3000 ( 561717 )

      Negative.

      Here's a picture of a first generation DC's guts:

      http://www.mindspring.com/~refridgerator/dc5.jpg

      Note the heatsink and fan combo on the top-left of the image.

      Victor
  • Well, you can scratch Antarctica and Siberia as places you can't use this notebook, if the liquid coolant freezes in very low external temperatures.
    • Hopefully, they'll have sense enough to test it in low pressure situations as well. Would be a shame to have cabin depressurization on a plane and have the notebook cooler explode.
      • No, that would be funny as.

        Take off.... climb for twenty minutes then "paff! SHIT!" from business class.

        Larf larf larf.
        Dave
      • The change in pressure won't effect the volume of the coolant (assuming it is water.) Only a gas coolant would be effected. This does however effect the boots used by the Canadian military. Their winder boots have a pocket of air to help insulate them. They have a little air valve on their side that needs to be opened so that the boots don't explode during air transport.

        By the way, if anyone ever needs some very warm, durable boots - check out an army surplus store. The only commercial boots that even come close are in the $300 range and aren't as durable. The military has some damn nice equipment...
    • For that matter, I live in North Dakota at the moment and it gets pretty damn cold here too. Still, when you consider that LCD's don't work in cold weather either, it's really not a problem.
    • Isn't that the whole point? The colder the liquid, as long as it had room in the coolant system to freeze and expand, the happier I am. If the entire system functioned there, the cooling system would rock ;o) Heck, you'd probably even use your hands to help out.
    • Two things:
      • the coolant will be one of the less sensitive bits of the laptop. Go on, stick *your* laptop in the freezer for a fews days if you doubt me.
      • odds on the additive will lower the freezing point, possibly by 10-20K


      Moz
      • You know, I still recall an article I read in one of the PC rags several years back. They took a bunch of laptops and 'real world' stressed them; threw them in the oven, freezer, dropped them from a desk, that sort of thing. Did before and after benchmarks for each, then took one of each laptop, and did everything to it, just to see if it would still run. The thing I recall is that one of the tests was spilling a set amount of coffee on the keyboard, waiting for it to dry, then trying it out. One of the laptops actually ran 11 percent faster after this was done to it. Freezing a laptop won't harm the electronics, unless you power it up cold, where the shock might start cracking the silicon or blowing the conduits. Letting it return to room temps before you turn it on will prevent damage from happening. Not sure if the LCD will survive, though.
    • First of all, I'm not sure your laptop will last long operating at freezing temperatures anyway. Plus, it would take longer for the wanter coolant to freeze (even without an addative) since the computer produces heat. Why was this insightful? Funny, maybe.
  • well, coffee cooled.

    What, you want it to work or something?

  • With the amount of heat the P4 generates, you might be able to cook pizza, replace home central heating, ...

  • Boring. (Score:3, Funny)

    by NiftyNews ( 537829 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2002 @12:16AM (#3075781) Homepage
    Water-cooled? That's boring.

    Now what I want is an Ice-Cream-Cooled Laptop. Like an electronic Klondike bar. Mmmm...

  • Someday far in the future, I'll be up very late in my office, listening to the silence, and thinking "Man it sure was alot less lonely when we had those fans going."

    • Re:Quiet ?= Good (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27, 2002 @12:24AM (#3075824)
      "Man it sure was alot less lonely when we had those fans going."

      Record your current fan noise, so you can play it back on the internal speaker of your future computer if it's too quiet.

  • Not just for overclockers anymore (Score:5, Informative)

    by Starship Trooper ( 523907 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2002 @12:17AM (#3075789) Homepage Journal
    Kind of like Honda shipping riced up Civics by default, it's pretty funny that the industry is following the overclockers. To take a look at the roots of water cooling, check out the definitive hobbyist on the subject [agaweb.com], complete with alternate designs, plans, technical faq - the works.

    Personally, I'll buy it when it's packaged and done for me, and not until then.
    • You're claiming that overclockers invented water-cooled computers? What about, for example, the Cray 1 [tmeg.com]? And there's almost certainly earlier examples. This is really old industry tech, not some crazy idea the hotrodder kids dreamed up.

  • Coffee (Score:5, Funny)

    by mbstone ( 457308 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2002 @12:20AM (#3075798)
    According to the specs, the unit will produce 0.3 oz of 140 degree-F. water per minute. Therefore, it should only take 15 minutes to brew one Standard 5 Oz. Cup of coffee. Now, if they can only get the CD-ROM drive to double as a cupholder....

    • Re:Coffee (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27, 2002 @12:34AM (#3075873)
      Therefore, it should only take 15 minutes to brew one Standard 5 Oz. Cup of coffee.

      Don't forget that you need to start brewing a new cup every 15 minutes to maintain the heat flow. If you drink one cup of coffee every 15 minutes for the whole work day, you'll be overclocked too!
    • I can't see any downsides. More computrons, faster brewing. Everyone's happy.

  • Kits already available (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jucius Maximus ( 229128 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2002 @12:21AM (#3075806) Journal
    You can already buy [bigfootcomputers.com] water cooling kits for your PC. (This company is accepting backorders.)
  • Like a liquid that doesn't conduct electricity, isn't caustic, and isn't extremely sticky when dried? It would seem to me that would make for easier repairs in the future and make for a safer investment in an unproven application of cooling technology.

    People expect reliability out of their performance laptops, afterall.

    • Re:Why not better than water cooling? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Like a liquid that doesn't conduct electricity, isn't caustic, and isn't extremely sticky when dried?

      doesn't conduct electricity . . . check

      isn't caustic . . . check

      isn't extremely sticky when dried . . . D'oh!

      ~~~

  • With the power consumption on a P4 you wont even be able to keep the thing alive(on battery) long enough to over heat the processor.
  • If you want a water cooling system but don't have a notebook, http://www.agaweb.com/coolcpu/ [agaweb.com] is a good place to start. I tried it out once and overclocked my system by over 50%.

  • Logical choice (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SevenTowers ( 525361 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2002 @12:23AM (#3075818) Homepage
    Water has a much higher calorific capacity than air. I believe it's around 4.19J/g*Celsius which is very high.

    It is the logical choice for cooling, being less noisy, parts have to move slower, etc etc... But why does the article say this is for garage hobbyists? Water cooling has been around for a while and at least 5 relatively large cies offer it. Tomshardware and Anandtech have had quite a few reviews of the different brands.

    Another plus is you can plug everything on the same circuit, Northbridge, CPU, GPU, hell, even the power supply. All you have to do is increase the pipe size by a relatively small factor.

    The temperature is maintained around ambient too, so the cooling is MUCH more efficient than air.

    The next step is nanocooling. There was an article in Nature a way back about nanofans (more like oscillating piezoelectric thingys), that dissipate heat at an astounding rate (although I don't recall how exactly since they throw it at the air which doesn't have such a good calorific capacity...). Anyways, the point is that this isn't really revolutionary because it has been used in home computers (by more than garage hobbyists) for at least 3 years. And before that there was Kryotech...

    • Re:Logical choice (Score:3, Interesting)

      by FFFish ( 7567 )
      Is water the logical choice for cooling? I'd have thought oil would be. Particularly as a synthetic oil should be non-reactive, quite unlike water. Although, come to think of it, that'd eliminate built-in product failure...

      • Re:Logical choice (Score:2, Interesting)

        by khuber ( 5664 )
        >Is water the logical choice for cooling? I'd have thought oil would be.

        I wouldn't think that. Water has a higher specific heat and much higher thermal conductivity. Water is not "reactive", plus when you spill water, it evaporates.

        -Kevin

  • "A water tank is placed at back of the display panel and a pump resides in the main body of the machine, she says."

    Look if I have to lug around a water tank and pump then what's the use of having a laptop.
  • Chalk it up to a publicity stunt. Laptops already are starved for power. You start adding a water pump to the mix, and you drop your usable time by at least a 1/2 hour I estimate. In any event, if your processing so much with a laptop that you need a water cooler, you should be on a desktop.

    I does not add up.
  • As cool as it sounds, someone else thought of it already :)

    http://www.infoworld.com/articles/pi/xml/00/04/1 7/ 000417piwater.xml

    As one who has done considerable research into watercooled stuff, the cooling gains are pretty good as compared to air cooling. This is multilied by the fact that the active cooling system on a notebook is limited to a tiny 60MM fan, and a heatsink that is about a half inch high. If you can keep the system closed, it won't be too bad, however this will add considerable weight to the unit, taking into account the resevoir, pump, waterblock, stuff like that.
  • The source of new water can be the output of your methanol fuel-cell batteries [slashdot.org] :)

    Kaos
  • Dell has cooled its laptops via water for at least a year now. Take apart any Latitude or Inspiron over 800MHZ and look at the small copper pipes that sit in front of the cooling fan. Those pipes circulate water over the CPU, helping to cool it.

  • Um...bad idea. (Score:5, Funny)

    by qslack ( 239825 ) <qslack@@@pobox...com> on Wednesday February 27, 2002 @12:30AM (#3075855) Homepage Journal
    No, really, I didn't wet my pants!! My laptop leaked!

  • This already exists. (Score:5, Informative)

    by jonnythan ( 79727 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2002 @12:30AM (#3075859)
    Water cooled laptops are nothing new at all. Check out these water cooling laptop articles, produced from a quick google search:

    Toshiba [infoworld.com]

    IBM [ibm.com]

    I know there are others, but I can't seem to find them at the moment. It's certainly my underestanding that there have been water cooled laptops in production for quite a while.

    • I remember reading a review of the first portable SPARC laptop, that had water cooling.

      That was in Byte/UK in 1993
    • A close read of the IBM article reveals their solution is to use a heat pipe instead of what most hobbyist are doing. Heat pipes are sealed cooling systems that exploit the fact that it takes 100's of times more heat to vaporize water (or other coolants) than it does to raise water 1 degree. To get water to vaporize at around 25-30 degrees C, you have to create a vacuum inside the coolant pipes.

      Heat pipes are an old idea - they were used in the Apollo program. IBM's key addition to the technology is developing a hinge that efficiently transfers heat between the laptop's body (the heat source) and the display (the heat radiator). There isn't much info in the article referenced in the original post to figure out just what Hitachi thinks is original.

  • What happens if you add water cooling to your cray, and you start a level 1 hurricane over your processor?

  • Intel: take a Marketing class (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gunner800 ( 142959 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2002 @12:32AM (#3075865) Homepage
    Isn't this really just more evidence that a P4 is inappropriate for laptops? Intel is making a good attempt at targeting a specific market (P4 is "primarily" a server chip), but their insistence on cramming every processor into a small box just for shits and giggles is silly.

    • Re:Intel: take a Marketing class (Score:4, Informative)

      by tftp ( 111690 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2002 @01:00AM (#3075968) Homepage
      As long as I can regulate the performance (and the battery drain) it's OK. Many notebooks are used mostly as desktops, but the owner has to travel with them occasionally. That's the fate of all notebooks I have at the office. Two of them are travelling right now, but when at customer's site, they will be plugged into AC and demoing our stuff at full speed. Same when I use them at the office. Rarely they are used on airplanes.
    • Jetta recently came out with a P4 laptop, in both 1.6 and 1.7GHz.

      sadly, they do not sell to the public.
    • Eh...I remember when the (original) Pentium came out. The Mac afficionados were chortling over it, claiming that you'd NEVER be able to put it in a laptop, because its power consumption and heat output were too high. Three generations later... *shrug* If the chipmakers make it, someone's gonna want to put it in a laptop.
  • We could use the natural thermal properties of a closed system to circulate the water, by having it rise to exchangers in the screen-backing area...

    We could then start adding turbines to reclaim some of the energy lost as heat from the unit, and use that to help prolong the time between charges on the unit! Just think! The more hard number crunching you do, the hotter the processor gets, and the longer your laptop runs! It'd be a reason for EVERYONE to run seti@home!

  • A notebook computer that MAKES COFFEE TOO? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Seth Finkelstein ( 90154 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2002 @12:34AM (#3075874) Homepage Journal
    They don't realize what htey have here! A combination notebook computer AND and a coffee-maker! This could capture the market all-night, err, I mean overnight :-)

    Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org) [sethf.com]

  • Hitachi Unveils Water-Cooled Notebooks[from the pcworld subjectline]

    Generally wen you "unveil" somthing you show it off to people.
    So were the hell are the press photos?

    • Re:Unveiled where? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by shimpei ( 3348 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2002 @02:07AM (#3076184) Homepage
      Here [impress.co.jp] is an article in Japanese, with pictures, linked from a Slashdot Japan [slashdot.jp] article.

      By the way, the revolutionary part about this laptop is that it uses a mechanical pump to move the hot coolant to the radiation panel at the back of the LCD, whereas traditional cooling mechanisms uses the palmrest and/or the bottom of the laptop to dissipate heat in addition to the air fan. The idea is that

      • a pump is much more reliable than a fan, because it doesn't move as fast or ingest foreign dust particles all the time; and
      • 2) heating the back of the LCD affects the user experience less than with the palmrest or the bottom.

      Also, before people start screaming about how big the water tanks are in the photos, the article says that the tanks were deliberately enlarged to emphasize the point of these prototypes, and they will be reduced in production models.

  • Now I can have the best of both worlds: a laptop computer with an integrated sports water bottle!

    Proper computing for the athletic geek!

  • Won't work -- tried it (Score:4, Funny)

    by rjamestaylor ( 117847 ) <rjamestaylor@gmail.com> on Wednesday February 27, 2002 @12:39AM (#3075890) Journal
    After reading the Slashdot story I tried water-cooling my Toshiba Satellite. I'm sorry to say but Hitachi has obviously not tried this in the real world, 'cause if they did...well, let's just say that I'm using my wife's desktop to write this post.

    Wow. Talk about Vaporware...yikes...

  • Can we over clock em now?

    maybe strap a larger radiator on the back of the screen and your ready to go.

  • Hot beverages wherever I go!
  • I could have sworn that when the first 1GHz laptops came out a few months ago, They took one apart on TechTV to show the water cooling and all.
  • I don't know about this. Just another component to break, and leaking water INSIDE the laptop would be bad. Is it really worth it?
  • It seems to me that this must be prone to leaks and hence unreliable. If the pump and chips are in the main body of the machine and the heat exchanger in the display part, somewhere there has to be a flexible tube carrying the water or some arrangement with O rings. (to allow for opening the display/lid). An irritating thing about flexible tubes is that with repeated flexing, they crack. O rings are even worse!

    All those jokes about leaky laptops may not be so far off the mark...

  • just what i need, a $3000 portable coffee warmer (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Indy1 ( 99447 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2002 @01:01AM (#3075974)
    honestly, isnt a P4 in a notebook a complete and total waste? The main performance bottleneck in a notebook anymore is the harddrive, not the CPU. The whole idea of a laptop is to be able take it to various places and be able to run it for a few hours on the battery. With the kind of power the P4 sucks down, you can kiss that goodbye. Add in fans to cool down the processor and/or water, and more of your battery goes bye bye. You'd need DDR to get the most out of the P4 as well, sdram + P4 is horribly slow and Rambus generates huge amounts of heat, which we all know is a no no in a notebook. I'm sorry Intel, but not everyone wants or needs a Marketing Processor (which is what the P4 really is, marketing over engineering) in a notebook. Give me a cool running low power Mobile P3 any day of the week.
    • With current tech, we could create a 486 based word processing machine, thinner, cheaper, lighter, and with a week's worth of power, rather than just a few hours.

      Why they insist on forcing desktop replacements on the market is beyond me. (Actually, it isn't beyond me, it's all about keeping those profit margins high.)

      As a writer, dealing with these noisy, overheating, overpriced, heavy machines is distasteful. As a programmer, I'm gonna use my laptop as a terminal, not a server, so all those extra CPU cycles are wasted.

      • Soooo..... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by 2nd Post! ( 213333 )
        Have you considered a 14" 600MHz 6lb iBook for your needs?

        Word, Office, bash, sips at the battery, and comes with a fairly hefty 55W battery too. It runs, what, at a rated 6hours on a single battery? I suspect it runs lower, of course, but still, 4.5 hours isn't horrible.
        • No, 4.5 hours isn't horrible compared to the average desktop replacement notebook.

          What we need is something like the previous poster said, though...screw fast processors...a laptop's advantage is that it's portable...most people want a laptop for word processing and e-mail...How many CPU cycles do you really need for that?

          • The nice thing about the Apple laptops and the PPC series (I have a G4 PowerBook) is that, when you do something 'simple' like email and word processing, the hardware has the capability to throttle down the CPU (from 600MHz to 500MHz) as well as insert idle states, both are separate capabilities.

            Even better, if you have enough ram, the system will put the drive to sleep too. It really isn't all that far off from the original poster's wish.

            My laptop, when I'm just listening to music (screen off, only an mp3 player on) can play for about 6 hours. This is an mp3 player that sucks 20% of the CPU, too. Anyway, the Mac laptops are some of the most portable laptops around :)
        • 600MHz PPC for text processing is overkill, considering I can watch fullscreen DivX on my 400MHz K6 laptop. Of course it might not be enough for running Word...
      • With current tech, we could create a 486 based word processing machine, thinner, cheaper, lighter, and with a week's worth of power, rather than just a few hours.

        Sure, but only if you don't need a display for word prosessing. It's not like there's a tech available to make cheap enough displays that can be run for weeks with small battery only. And you have seen GBA - we need display that generates light.

        • It's not like there's a tech available to make cheap enough displays that can be run for weeks with small battery only.

          Oh dear, It would seem that my Palm is a figment of my imagination.

          Michael
      • I bought an IBM Thinkpad i series s30 that was the nearest approximation I could find to your spec. It's got a 700MHz CPU and a physically small screen. The CPU is overpowered, which is a shame, but with the larger battery I get easily a full working day. Small snags are that all the docs are in Japanese (eg the maintenance manual, web pages ...), and that since it's ACPI based power management under Linux is poor. More details here [aglet.net]. Expensive, but it is a seriously nice little piece of kit.
    • Give me a Pentium-I 300Mhz with sixteen hours battery life any day of the week...

      (I figure if they can make a P4 run four hours, the P1 should be good for at least four times longer!)

  • hmm, embarassing situations ? (Score:3, Funny)

    by UU7 ( 103653 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2002 @01:07AM (#3075996)
    Walking off a long flight.
    No, honestly, my laptop just leaked...

  • What!? (Score:2, Redundant)

    by Publicus ( 415536 )

    Maybe I'm being silly, but is this really neccessary? I'm sure it will sell. I work in Government, particularly law enforcement, and the purchasing decisions are made totally backwards. Recently, all of the agents (cops) in our department got new laptops. It was considered important that they be able to transport these things so that they can be more flexible or dynamic or something... Anyway, the guy in charge of ordering bought the Dell "desktop replacement" laptop, which weighs about 8 pounds! The result? We have a bunch of overpriced desktops with LCD displays and laptop keyboards. The agents never take them ANYWHERE.

    To get back on topic, I can see how this is going to be a "It's more expensive, so it must be better," or, a, "Finally, I can get the computing power that I need in a laptop!" I've had a Pentium III 850 for almost a year now and I just can't see how that isn't going to be sufficient processing power to drive my applications for a long time. Up until a few weeks ago I was using a PII 300 at work, and it was great with Windows 2000 and office XP.

    The gist of my comment: In 90% (or more) of the instances customers who buy these machines will not need the processing power that is provided by the advanced cooling. My problem is when it's public sector buyers that are misinformed and willing to spend public dollars on gimmicky stuff.

    Wait, never mind, maybe you do need that Pentium 4 to do email...sorry!

  • Repairs.. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Werelock ( 558572 )
    So instead of ~$400 to fix a broken display they could end up paying for the whole unit when the water drips/sprays all over the keyboard and then down to the inards. Brilliant...

    Personally, I'd have engineered the water tank to the bottom of the unit or as another drive bay. Gravity would force the water from a broken unit outside the laptop.

  • How is this a good idea? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RainbowSix ( 105550 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2002 @01:29AM (#3076074) Homepage
    Watercooling requires a way to move that water, ie, a pump. Moving parts that require power, and the problem is that you still have to get x watts of heat out of the water at the other end. I think the current use of a heat pipe is much better than watercooling. The only "movement" is the phase change powered by the heat itself, and so there is less chance of failure.
    • the price and the size of the water-cooled notebook PC will remain about the same. Power consumption will also be approximately equal, Uchiyama says. However, the water cooling system should have a life cycle that is 1.7 times longer than an air-cooled system

    So... they don't make any extra profit (probably less for an identical retail price), there's no extended battery life (so how is this "more efficient"?), and the only benefit is that it (apparently) lives longer than an air cooled system, a fairly intangible benefit even for a corporate purchaser, given that by the time the air cooling system is likekly to give out, the laptop will have moved so far down the corporate food chain that it will probably have long since been "recycled" by a sticky fingered employee.

    Some problems with this.

    • 1) Anyone ever heard of the fan giving out on a laptop?
    • 2) Wouldn't it be more cost efficient to put in a 50 cent (manufacturing cost) fan rather than a 35 cent one?
    • 3) Why would a manufacturer want to extend the lifetime of their kit? To sell less kit? Riiiiiight.

    Technology for technology's sake? This is a demo unit, and is smells to me like some R&D czar trying to garner some media interest in a dying project. It's nice technology, but it seems largely pointless.

  • Leaks... (Score:3, Funny)

    by TheConfusedOne ( 442158 ) <the@confused@one.gmail@com> on Wednesday February 27, 2002 @09:15AM (#3076899) Journal
    Two obvious ones:

    1) And you thought MEMORY leaks killed programs...

    and

    2) Going into that super important customer meeting after the water coolant just let go leaving a huge wet spot on the front of your pants: "No, really, it was my laptop!"
  • Is there such a thing as a corporate user? Do corporations still buy anything when the economy is being driven by consumers?

  • yikes (Score:2, Funny)

    by gleam_mn ( 226101 )
    And I thought it was bad when the water pump died on my car!

  • Water cooled notebooks.

    I recently heard a presentation which indicated just how difficult the situation is getting with respect to power density. IIRC, in terms of W/cm, todays chips are surpassing the output of hotplates, moving towards the realm of nuclear reactors.

    I'd heard the switch from bi-polar to CMOS in the 1990s helped to avert a similar imminent meltdown.

    At these extremes, there have to be some research efforts into finding some way out of this mess.

    But maybe there's little need for laptop computers to have a faster CPU. What are you going to do with it, type your email faster? Once you can show videos in Powerpoint, why is there any more need for speed in these things?

  • If only notebooks would allow you to easily underclock, then you run at lower power and not bake your lap or boil water.

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