PC's Waste Heat Could Add To Processing Power 134
Urchin writes to tell us that physicists working in a new field called "phononics" claim that waste heat from a processor could actually be used to add to its power. "Crunching data coded using photons — photonic computing — is one example, and in 2007 researchers built the first workable optical transistor. But now the idea of computing using heat flow is gaining popularity among applied physicists. Heat travels through solid materials by means of phonons — ripples of vibration passing through a series of atoms. Those ripples can be used to send and store data in digital form: one temperature is read as 0 or 'off' while a second, higher temperature is interpreted as 1 or 'on.' Provided that the thermal memory is well insulated, it can keep its temperature — and data — intact for a long time."
Nice, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
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If you have a noisy, fluctuating signal then it makes sense to output a 1 when the upper threshold is crossed, and to output a 0 when the lower threshold is crossed.
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Didn't read TFA but it could be a hysteresis [wikipedia.org] kind of thing which is thought of as a boundary region rather than a single threshold.
If you have a noisy, fluctuating signal then it makes sense to output a 1 when the upper threshold is crossed, and to output a 0 when the lower threshold is crossed.
You mean 0 when the threshold is crossed one way, and 1 when crossed the opposite way?
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No, you have two thresholds. The region in between them is indeterminate, while the region above the upper threshold is 1 and the one below the lower threshold is 0. The distance between the two could be determined based on the signal-to-noise ratio.
At least, I'm pretty sure that's what the GP was getting at.
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What happens if you get temperatures that are precisely inbetween 0 and 1 values?
I'd assume the thing that happens on an electrical signal path when you get a voltage that's precisely inbetween 0 and 1...
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i'm not sure, but i'll let you know as soon as i finish cutting this electron in half.
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Then it fails the cyclic redundancy check and has be be ...reheated I guess.
CPU Turbo (Score:3, Interesting)
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Sounds like there will be a new market for all of those 386 boxes with the turbo button.
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Yeah, but now we'll start seeing VTEC and Type-R badges too...
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Lowering the RPM to maintain the speed? You know, changing up a gear has that effect, right?
I don't see how adjusting the lift profile of the valves can affect RPM vs Speed...
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FYI, VTEC isn't really the same as a turbo charger.
The people to whom he's alluding [imageshack.us] don't care.
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Caption to the caption:
"Look out! Here comes an s!"
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VTEC stands for Variable Valve Timing and Electronic Lift Control. It allows the engine to adjust the valve timing in real time to provide additional power at higher RPMs. It essentially allows low displacement engines to expand their powerband at very high RPMs.
It does absolutely nothing for ride quality and can be employed at any road speed, provided the transmission allows the engine to operate within the RPM required for VTEC to operate.
Re:VTEC (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:CPU Turbo (Score:5, Funny)
With such memorable phrases as:
"See these stickers? They make my computer go faster!"
"With this giant wing on the back of my front-wheel drive computer I get the down force I need to go fast"
Obligary Simpsons Quote. (Score:4, Insightful)
Lisa, In this house we obey the laws of thermal dynamics!
That said. It may save some power converting loss head back again making it more efficient.
But they way that most people use computers I don't know if there is a benefit. We rarely run at full CPU Heat kicking.
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We rarely run at full CPU Heat kicking.
That's the 2nd time I've heard that this month.
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You not only read it but also commented on it. It can't have been much of a failure. Next time try making your actions line up with your words.
You not only read it but also commented on it. It can't have been much of a failure. Next time try making your actions line up with your words.
You not only read it but also commented on it. It can't have been much of a failure. Next time try making your actions line up with your words.
You not only read it but also commented on it. It can't have been much of a failure. Next time try making your actions line up with your words.
You not only read it but also commented on it. It can't have been much of a failure. Next time try making your actions line up with your words.
The words line up quite nicely. Thanks, Slashcode!
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Hot new computing techniques! (Score:3, Funny)
I wonder how long before this is used for something bad? Does this possibly mean that the sun, inhabited by an alien life form, has turned off the one's and zero's in an effort to relay the message GTFO!
FTFA:
Casati says practical physicists must rise to the challenge set by the theorists. Yet even if they can, phononic computing is unlikely to threaten electronics because phonons travel a lot slower than electrons. Li imagines that the two technologies will work together, in hybrid devices that perform some computation using waste heat.
I bet there are better ways to use this than PC computing
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There are easily better applications, but you'd be surprised how much uses "PC Computing" these days.
How about enabling automatic de-icing systems on planes without needing pilot intervention. Or using the engine exhaust heat to tune your car's performance?
All of these use computers and are totally valid applications of TFA. So I hope they develop these devices if only for use in other computing fields.
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Not only that. Since this phononics computing has absolutely no advantage over conventional (electronic) computing, the amount of time and money wasted is ... well ... a waste.
There are several viable options here, and I bet most, if not all, are already under study and development:
- Improving the efficiency (less power waste due to Joule effect )
- Converting this back into electricity (yes, it is not very efficient, but it is better than wasting)
- Us
Hooked on (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
"Provided that the thermal memory is well insulated", that basically means putting it on a different piece of silicon/on something else entirely, which kind of defeats the object as I see it.
While I haven't looked at this in great detail, it strikes me that achieving anything near useful density is going to very difficult due to entropy, and the simple fact that putting very small volumes at slightly different temperatures right next to each others quickly leads to a relatively uniform temperature distribution.
This sounds somewhat improbable/unfeasible to me...
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because the math works, doesn't mean it is viable to implement.
As TFA say, the theorists just came up with the idea and some of the math, and pretty much left to the practical physicists to find a way to implement it.
Next, how to use your farts, produced while using a computer (wasted right now), to increase its power.
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Next, how to use your farts, produced while using a computer (wasted right now), to increase its power.
Ummm....my system is overclocked right now.
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Next, how to use your farts, produced while using a computer (wasted right now), to increase its power.
I'm channelling mine to Washington. Each fart produces more brainpower than Capitol Hill produces in a week.
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"practical physicists" - didn't they use to call them engineers?
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Re:Hmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Quick, someone tell the physicits! I'm sure they forgot all about this.
More like someone tell the journalists (the people who actually WROTE this article). It happens all the time that a scientist says something offhand like "and you could use this for processing power", and a journalist misinterprets this to mean that it's both feasible, and commercially viable.
reminds me of xbox red ring of death (Score:2)
heat to a certain point, the joint points melt, connecting two neighboring leads, and congratulations, you have a short... hooray for phononics transistor!
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"Provided that the thermal memory is well insulated", that basically means putting it on a different piece of silicon/on something else entirely, which kind of defeats the object as I see it.
To interface a phononic computational device with a traditional electronic device without leaking heat, you could use something like an optoisolator, though obviously it might not be preferable to use an electric photo element.
While I haven't looked at this in great detail, it strikes me that achieving anything near useful density is going to very difficult due to entropy, and the simple fact that putting very small volumes at slightly different temperatures right next to each others quickly leads to a relatively uniform temperature distribution.
From the article:
It exploits the fact that some materials can only exchange heat when they are at similar temperatures.
This sounds somewhat improbable/unfeasible to me...
You're probably right, it probably is infeasible. But then again, a lot of good things do start out that way.
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Good Luck With That! (Score:5, Insightful)
This, IMHO is an academic concept at best. State definition by thermal state has been done in research before but it is slow, and trying to collect the waste energy in the form of heat and re-use it as the byproduct in another state machine sounds a bit questionable.
Mechanical computers are viable as well, but not too terribly practical.
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Mechanical computers are viable as well, but not too terribly practical.
As proved in 1991. [wikipedia.org]
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Mechanical computers are viable as well, but not too terribly practical.
That's largely a question of scale, isn't it?
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In theory - if you can use a medium to create a NAND gate, then anything and everything needed to create a computer can be defined from that. Again "in theory" is the important catch phrase. You can do that using relays, transistors, vacuum tubes, thermal storage, mechanical logic, and water valves. All have been demonstrated. The practical realization of a big scale machine is another issue.
Yawn (Score:2)
Yes, temperature gradients are a form of information, but get real guys: they are the bottom of food chain of useful computing tech. A real computer dumps heat as a side-effect of doing useful work - its more efficient to try to recover the heat as energy than to directly use it to compute. Sure, if you have a steam locomotive, it makes sense to add secondary and even tertiary energy-extractors to increase locomotion, but that is a special case: the locomotive is isolated and has big energy needs - this
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Yes, temperature gradients are a form of information, but get real guys: they are the bottom of food chain of useful computing tech. A real computer dumps heat as a side-effect of doing useful work - its more efficient to try to recover the heat as energy than to directly use it to compute. Sure, if you have a steam locomotive, it makes sense to add secondary and even tertiary energy-extractors to increase locomotion, but that is a special case: the locomotive is isolated and has big energy needs - this is not the case for computers.
I like your idea about trying to recover the heat. The only serious proposals I've heard involved using it to heat the building in which the machines are stored during cold weather. I'm a bit surprised that I haven't heard of anyone using something like a Sterling engine (maybe these could be miniaturized?) to try and do useful work with the waste heat, in much the same way that electric cars can use regenerative braking to minimize wasted energy. Or perhaps there could be a device like a solar panel tha
would be interesting (Score:2, Informative)
Seems like a solid state thermocouple might be easier to use. I'd like to see some sort of heat pipe from the case to one, then use that output to power the screen (maybe not the main one but a smaller backup little screen??). I have no idea of the state of the art there though or what sort of useful electricity you might get from one. I have seen a kerosene lantern from Russia that uses a thermocouple to scavenge waste heat from the kero burning to provide power for a table radio.
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At one of our compute farms, we actually pipe the waste heat into a local town as a low-cost house-heating solution (think steam-pipes, but lower quality energy.) It works there because even 100 degree hot air is nice to have when the outside temp is 0f.
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Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
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The only serious proposals I've heard involved using it to heat the building in which the machines are stored during cold weather.
Doesn't this naturally happen just by running the machines in the building?
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The only serious proposals I've heard involved using it to heat the building in which the machines are stored during cold weather.
Doesn't this naturally happen just by running the machines in the building?
To some degree, yes. I think those proposals had more to do with collecting the heat and integrating it into the central heating system of the building. In other words, it may be more of a problem of efficient distribution (maybe only one room or a few rooms have lots of computers and you want to heat all of the building, for example). I'm using a lot of words like "I think" and "it may" because I'm honestly rather ignorant about these systems, but I believe that's the gist of it.
Steampunk (Score:2)
Hugely inefficient, but sooooo cool to have a Steam-Powered PC.
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Maybe it would generate enough to power the case fans?
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Also, fans in a water-cooled system?
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Also, fans in a water-cooled system?
Yes, fans in a water-cooled system. You need fans on the radiators to extract the waste heat from the water. You can do it passively but that's massively inefficient. There are really two reasons to go with water cooling on a PC. You can do it to give yourself a bit more overhead in the overclocking department (since you can move a bit more heat using water and massive radiators, versus a individual heatsinks and fans), or you can do it for a silent system in which case you often need to under-clock the sys
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Besides what orclevegame said, there's also the fact that you need cooling for things other than the CPU, GPU, and chipset, assuming you get water cooling blocks for all three of those components. Hard drives, for instance, also like to have airflow.
phonons? (Score:2)
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Phonons are just a very weird state of photons, for suitably high values of "very weird"--they propagate by the dipole interactions of the substrate, and are thus at the bottom an EM phenomena. But that isn't a very useful way to look at them (about as useful as saying that sound in air involves oscillatory motion of masses and thus could be considered a source of gravity waves).
Rather than asking "how do they fit into the standard model?" it
Tooooooo slooooow. (Score:5, Insightful)
Phonons travel at the speed of sound in their medium, which is 100,000 times slower than the speed of electrical signals or light. If you've got a phononic circuit running at a Ghz clock rate, signals can only travel a few microns. This size limit severely restricts the number of individual components you can have in your circuit.
Go light, or go home.
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The utility of phononic circuits stretches into areas where most electric circuits would not thrive. being able to process information with the only requirement being a temperture gradient would be quite handy for many occasions, considering you usually have the body-surroundings temperature gradient availible.
Even ignoring any direct applications we're likely to see within a few decade
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The utility of phononic circuits stretches into areas where most electric circuits would not thrive.
For example, Hell, where things have all eternity to happen.
"Satan, my laptop is taking forever to boot!"
"Yes, and by the time it's finished, Windows will insist on telling you that all the thousand icons on your desktop are stale and should be deleted! And there will be a ton of updates that have to downloaded and installed! Bwah ha ha ha ha!"
Much like those rare occasions when I fire up Windows in a virtual machine. You know they use Windows in Hell.
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Plus I'd think it would be very sensitive to thermal noise or excessive heat.
Or... (Score:2)
Just use the heat to create more electricity to increase the efficiency. Thermal Acoustic Piezo Energy Conversion [wikipedia.org]
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I've often wondered why we don't do this.
Talk about slow.... (Score:2)
Talk about slow... matter has this undesireable property of "thermal inertia". Your basic thermal wire is going to have a hard time making very many transitions per second. We're talking centihertz.
They'll have to speed up Vista by a factor of several gazillion to run well on this CPU.
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Thermal inertia? Inertia is the tendency for the position of an object to keep changing at the same rate, unless an outside force is applied. Would thermal inertia then be the tendency for the temperature of an object to keep changing at the same rate, unless an outside force is applied?
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Replace /position/ with /velocity/ and the principle applies.
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So:
Inertia is the tendency for the velocity of an object to keep changing at the same rate, unless an outside force is applied.
I don't think that's correct.
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Matrioshka Brains (Score:2)
This is how the outer layers of a Matrioshka Brain would work, perhaps?
Thinking mountains (Score:2)
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Well, if we keep finding new ways to encode information and to engage in computation, it's conceivable that someday, everything in the universe could be used for computing.
And we can use it to answer The Last Question [wikipedia.org].
And in related news... (Score:2)
AMD stock jumped suddenly today.
I'm buying stock in Thermos (Score:2)
Dude (Score:1)
Overlooking The Obvious... (Score:2, Funny)
The net gain in computing power would be negative, simply because everyone knows that heat causes computrons to decay into bogons, resulting in an overall loss of processing power.
WTF? (Score:2)
Imaging the tech support nightmares. (Score:1)
Tech: Have you recently installed new software or hardware?
Caller: No, it just randomly started getting blue screens.
Tech: Have you had any power outages lately?
Caller: No, everything has been fine up until now.
Tech: Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Caller: Yes, I even turned off my printer and my heat lamp and speakers and all the other stuff plugged in here.
Tech: Sir, I'd recommend you turn off all the lights in your room while you
I've got a better idea (Score:4, Informative)
If I understand this properly (and it's not 100% guaranteed that I do), this sounds like an excessively complicated solution that would yield relatively little benefit. The "sandwich" idea from TFA sounds especially counterproductive, if external power is required to keep the hot side hit & the cold side cold.
Instead of trying to harness waste heat to eke out a fraction of a percent of extra processing power, here's an idea: how about sucking that waste heat into a small insulated pipe with a low-voltage van, and running that pipe down to my feet? It's very cold near the floor of my apartment, and some warm air aimed at my tootsies would be greatly appreciated while I use my computer.
Maybe this pipe could have a little door I could close in the summer, when the additional warmth would be less welcome.
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Could just put your PC under your desk...
interfacing with the future of computing? (Score:2)
Waste heat? What waste heat? (Score:1)
In the winter time (and where I am, it's damned cold out during the winter...snow banks are over my head right now), I have to shut off the heat vent in my office.
The heat thrown my all the machines in here, one main dev box, 1 laptop and 3 small appliance servers, plus all the peripherals keep the office nicely heated all winter.
So...what waste heat...I use mine, thanks!
Helpme Physicists/Circuit engineers (Score:2)
Why does a CPU emit heat when X instructions are made? Is there a reason, or perhaps a physical law that requires X quanta of heat per Information instruction?
I read elsewhere that the waste heat is the result of doing irreversible math on the CPU, and the thrown away information convert to heat. And I saw people working on CPUs that are reversible, which could recover the energy back out of them (minus negligible running costs).
Is that just pie in the sky academic research, or a viable path for CPUs to eve
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A computation is a process in which we take a memory area that may be in any randomly-chosen state, and reconfigure it to be in one specific state, corresponding to the return value of our computation.
This is a local reduction in entropy - reconfiguring that memory area into a single state out of the many possible. That means work has to be done,
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At the lowest possible level, we're talking about electrons moving around. Every time you do an instruction, a bunch of electrons have to move from one place to another. On the way, they inevitably bump into things. Whenever that happens, you lose a bit of energy as heat. That's what the oh-so-common equation, P=(I^2)R means. The I is the current (moving electrons), the R is the resistance (things electrons bump into), and the P is the power (energy per second that you lose as heat).
As for what you rea
Seasonal (Score:4, Funny)
Its winter. There is no such thing as 'waste heat'. Every watt emitted by a computer is a watt that doesn't have to be emitted by the heater.
Re:Seasonal (Score:4, Interesting)
The southern hemisphere says hi! We're still in the middle of an intense heatwave where the temperature inside is 304.5K.
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304 kelvin = 30.85 degrees Celsius
That's "intense heatwave"?
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You must have air conditioning. :)
Lets see... (Score:2)
...phononics proposes transmitting data as heat (thermal 'waves', whatever). So the heat generated by losses in various circuits on the chip would be noise to the data phonons we want.
This is analogous to signal to noise problems in electronic systems. And the solution in the electronic world, reducing the noise, means that we've got to be even more concerned about reducing the heat due to losses in a phononic chip.