New Fujitsu heat pipe technology could cool your next smartphone
One of the basic technologies that modern PCs rely on for CPU and GPU cooling may be making its way to mobile devices, thanks to pioneering work from Fujitsu Laboratories. The organization claims its new design can transfer 5x more heat than existing thin heat pipes, all while adding less than a millimeter to device thickness. The technology could be useful in balancing higher performance devices with their inevitable temperature increases.
Great. What’s a heat pipe?
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A heat pipe is a closed-loop structure that relies on the thermal conductivity of its outer surface and the phase transition of an internal liquid to cool a chip.
Let’s unpack that a bit more. The diagram below shows a simple heat pipe:As the fluid inside the heat pipe is heated, it eventually transforms into a vapor. That vapor travels to the “cool” side of the pipe, where it condenses back into a liquid, flows back into the “hot” side, and transforms into a vapor again. Heat pipes can improve thermal performance significantly when compared with solid metal alone, and are frequently used in laptops and many enthusiast desktop systems.
Why do I want one in my smartphone or tablet?
In the eight years since Steve Jobs launched the original iPhone, smartphone processor power has exploded upwards. The original iPhone used a Samsung 32-bit ARMv11 CPU underclocked to 420MHz. The performance improvements since then are actually difficult to illustrate because not many sites have tested every generation of phone, but Anandtechdid run the Browsermark 2.0 test across every Apple phone from the original to the 5S:
The Apple 5S was 5x faster than the original iPhone — as Anandtech’s full article shows, it’s actually a full 9x faster than the iPhone 3GS in a test like Geekbench.
However, this vastly increased performance, screen resolution, and LTE capability all comes at a cost. The chips inside modern phones can generate significantly more heat, even accounting for process technology improvements.
Heat pipes, therefore, are one potent way that manufacturers could reduce hot spots and improve device cooling without needing fans or bulky materials. The one trend that could derail the use of this technology is the industry’s terminal addiction to thinness as the overriding trait of choice in a next-generation phone. Personally, I think the trend has gone too far — I’d rather have a more robust device that doesn’t require a bulky case than a sliver of a smartphone that needs to be wrapped in plastic and rubber — but clearly I’m in the minority.
Fujitsu doesn’t state how much the final heat pipe weighs, but given its dimensions it can’t be much. The company hopes to deploy the technology commercially by 2017, which means it could be ready for smartphones and tablets about the same time as 10nm process technology.
AMD’s Radeon for next-gen smartphone, tablet graphics chip
A new report today indicates AMD may be teaming up with MediaTek to bring its Radeon graphics solution to tablets and smartphones. If true, it could open new markets for AMD’s hardware and fix what many have believed was a significant mistake.
Back in 2009, AMD negotiated the sale of its Imageon division to Qualcomm for $65 million. Qualcomm later took the Imageon line and rebranded it as Adreno (Adreno being an anagram of Radeon), and turned the segment into the cornerstone of its custom SoC division. AMD has taken a great deal of heat over the years for selling the business segment, but I’ve never been personally convinced it was a bad move. While it’s possible that the company could’ve earned better returns from continuing to license its IP to Qualcomm, it’s also possible that Qualcomm wasn’t interested in continuing that arrangement, or that AMD simply didn’t have cash to spare to drop into mobile graphics. Selling a business unit at a modest profit is better than hanging on to a segment you can’t afford to develop until the IP is outdated and useless.
Regardless of what the company might have done differently six years ago, this new dealcould mean AMD is preparing to throw its hat back into the smartphone and tablet ring. Now, if you’re familiar with Radeon’s latest desktop incarnations, that might seem a bit odd — the company’s hardware is notably less power efficient than Nvidia’s Maxwell, after all.
AMD’s Mullins hardware (that’s the second-generation Kabini) have TDPs of ~4.5W and are meant for tablets to start with. That 4.5W TDP includes both the CPU and GPU, with 128 cores, 8 texture mapping units, and 4 render outputs. It should be theoretically simple for MediaTek to pair a Radeon mobile GPU with an ARM core of their own design.
AMD rebuilt Carrizo’s GPU to specifically use less power.
If AMD’s Project Skybridge has advanced to any degree, it seems likely that the company has experience with pairing ARM Cortex cores and its own Radeon GPUs as well. The entire point of Skybridge was to build a swappable platform that x86 and ARM cores could both interface with — and that process is simplified if both SoCs have the same graphics engine. Toss in the fact that AMD has further refined its SoC implementation of its own GCN architecture by pulling down overall power consumption, and you’ve got a plausible case for how AMD would drop a mobile Radeon core into an ARM SoC and license that architecture to a third party.
The driver conundrum
The big question about how AMD would license its hardware to third parties actually doesn’t revolve around the GCN architecture at all, nor its implementation. The sticking point would be drivers — and whether AMD could provide a top-notch experience under Android.
Linux performance and compatibility has always been dodgy for AMD when compared with Nvidia or Intel. AMD, to its credit, has apparently been laying plans to improve its overall state of Linux support, but that’s a long-term initiative. Linux, of course, isn’t identical to Android, but the ability to write good driver code in a non-Windows platform is still critical to any licensing initiative. This is an issue that’s tripped up larger companies; Intel’s Bay Trail for Android was reportedly months late due to issues with the Android GPU drivers.
If AMD can provide the software, however, a MediaTek partnership could make a good deal of sense, particularly if that arrangement included support for features like HSA or helped push APIs like Vulkan into the mainstream. For now, it’s just a rumor, but with Nvidia largely pulling out of mobile, AMD may feel there’s an opening it can step into. Lisa Su, AMD’s CEO, has talked about continuing to pursue new market opportunities for embedded products — this could be one of the business segments she had in mind.
USB-C vs. USB 3.1
With the launch of the Apple MacBook and Google’s Chromebook Pixel, USB-C (also called USB Type-C) and the accompanying USB 3.1 standard are both hitting market somewhat earlier than we initially expected. If you’re curious about the two standards and how they interact, we’ve dusted off and updated our guide to the upcoming technology. The situation is more nuanced than it’s been with previous USB standard updates — USB 3.1 and USB Type-C connectors may be arriving together on the new machines, but they aren’t joined at the hip the way you might think.
USB Type-C: Fixing an age-old problem
The near-universal frustration over attempts to connect USB devices to computers has been a staple of nerd humor and lampooned in various ways until Intel finally found a way to take the joke quantum.
USB Type-C promises to solve this problem with a universal connector that’s also capable of twice the theoretical throughput of USB 3.0 and can provide far more power. That’s why Apple is pairing up Type-C and USB 3.1 to eliminate the power connector on the MacBook. It’s a goal we agree with, even if we’re less thrilled with the company’s decision to dump USB ports altogether with that single exception. Google’s approach, in providing two USB-C and two regular USB 3.0 ports, is obviously preferable, even though it adds a bit of bulk to the machine.
Type-C connectors will be shipped in a variety of passive adapters (an earlier version of this story erroneously asserted that such cables would not be available, Extremetech regrets the error). The spec provides for passive adapters with USB 3.0 / 3.1 on one end and USB Type-C on the other.
USB-C, USB 3.1 not always hooked together
The Type-C plug can be used with previous standards of USB, which means manufacturers don’t automatically have to adopt expensive 3.1 hardware if they want to include it in mobile devices. Apple, to be clear, is offering USB 3.1 on the new MacBook, though the company hasn’t disclosed which third party vendor is providing the actual chipset support.
A USB Type-C port next to USB 3.0.
The disconnect between USB 3.1’s performance standard and the USB Type-C connector is going to inevitably cause confusion. One reason the shift from USB 2.0 to 3.0 was relatively painless is because coloring both the cables and plugs bright blue made it impossible to mistake one type of port for the other.
The upside to decoupling USB 3.1 from USB-C, however, is that companies can deploy the technology on mobile phones and tablets without needing to opt for interfaces that inevitably consume more power. Then again, some might argue that this would be a moot point — the USB controller can be powered down when it isn’t active, and when it is active, the device should be drawing power off the PC or charging port anyway. Heat dissipation could theoretically remain a concern — higher bandwidth inevitably means higher heat, and in devices built to 3-4W specifications, every tenth of a watt matters.
If I had to bet, I’d bet that the 100W power envelope on USB 3.1 will actually be of more practical value than the 10Gbps bandwidth capability. While it’s true that USB 3.1 will give external SSD enclosures more room to stretch their legs, the existing standard still allows conventional mechanical drives to run at full speed, while SSDs can hit about 80% of peak performance for desktop workloads. It might not be quite as good, but it’s a far cry from the days when using USB 2.0 for an external hard drive was achingly slow compared to SATA. Signal overhead is also expected to drop significantly, thanks to a switch to a 128-bit and 132-bit encoding scheme, similar to that used in PCI-Express 3.0.
The ability to provide 100W of power, as opposed to 10W, however, means that nearly every manufacturers could ditch clunky power bricks. There would still be concern about ensuring that connect points were sufficiently reinforced, but provided such concerns can be accounted for, the vast majority of laptops could switch over to the new standard. Hard drives and other external peripherals could all be powered by single wires, as could USB hubs for multiple devices.
The higher bandwidth is nice, and a major selling point, but the flippable connector and the power provisioning will likely make more difference in the day-to-day reality of life. As forcompetition with Intel’s Thunderbolt, USB 3.1 will continue to lag Intel’s high-speed standard, but as bandwidth rises this gap becomes increasingly academic. At this point, it’s the features USB doesn’t allow, like RAID and TRIM, that matter more than the raw bandwidth does in most cases.
Apple’s MacBook will be first out the door with USB 3.1 and USB-C support, with vendors scurrying to match the company on both counts. LaCie has announced a new revision of itsPorsche Design Mobile Drive that takes advantage of the Type-C connector, but only offers USB 3.0. It’s going to take time for the 3.1 spec to really show up on peripheral devices, even those that adopt the USB-C cable. Motherboard support outside the Apple MacBook is probably 4-5 months away, though the first peripheral cables should be available well before that point.
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As Fujitsu notes, the conventional method for managing the excess heat generated by components in a smartphone has been to install sheets of metal or graphite with relatively high thermal conductivity.
But the company claims that the thermal conductive properties of these materials have reached their limit.Fujitsu's answer to this is the 'loop heat pipe', a thin heat-transfer device filled with a liquid coolant that works to move heat away from the hot component towards a cooler part of the device.
Graphene breakthrough hints at smartphone batteries that could last 25 percent longerHeat pipes aren't new to the computer industry and are already in use to move heat away from CPUs. But at less than 1mm thick, Fujitsu sees potential for its device to be attached to the CPU of a smartphone or tablet. It also claims that its design means it won't drain the device's battery.
"A loop heat pipe is a heat-transfer device that consists of an evaporator that absorbs heat from the heat source and a condenser that dissipates that heat away, with the two components connected by pipes into a loop," the company said."
A working fluid is encapsulated inside this closed loop as a coolant. The heat from the heat source evaporates the coolant, and the energy that goes into evaporating the coolant is taken away from the heat source, lowering its temperature. It is based off of the same principle used when sprinkling water on pavement to reduce heat."
The loop contains a vapour phase (where the heat is moved away from the CPU) and a liquid phase where that heat is dissipated and returned to the hot spotStacked sheets of copper with tiny pores inside the evaporator mimic a sponge to create a "capillary action" that drives the liquid around the loop, ensuring the device's orientation won't disturb its ability to transfer heat.
On top of this, since the device relies on heat from the hot component, it won't cause a drain on the battery.
"Because this loop heat pipe uses the heat from the heat source to power thermal transfer, without using an external pump or other energy source, it does not increase the overall energy consumption of the device in order to diffuse heat, allowing for convenient and comfortable usage of electronic devices," Fujitsu said.
Fujitsu may have the answer: a thin heat pipe that can spread heat around mobile devices, reducing extremes of temperature.
Fujitsu Laboratories created a heat pipe in the form of a loop that's less than 1mm thick. The device can transfer about 20W, about five times more heat than current thin heat pipes or thermal materials, the company said.
The technology could improve smartphones' performance by helping cool their CPUs and other heat-producing components, spreading that heat more evenly across other parts of the phone.
Overheating has been an issue with some Samsung Galaxy smartphones, and the Korean manufacturer apparently dropped Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 processor from the Galaxy S6 due to excessive heat concerns.
While heat pipes have been used in laptops, they are uncommon in smartphones, where sheets of metal or graphite have been used instead. Fujitsu said its pipe is the first of its kind under 1 mm thick that can be used in thin electronic devices.
The pipe consists of a stack of 0.1mm-thick copper sheets containing channels through which water circulates by capillary action, meaning it will work regardless of a smartphone's orientation. One part of the heat pipe sits over a heat source such as a CPU, which evaporates the water. Another part, a thermal diffusion plate, acts as a condenser, turning the vapor back into liquid and returning it to the evaporator part.
While the heat pipe doesn't remove the heat from the smartphone, it might limit overheating in particular areas by spreading heat around and reducing the temperature of the hottest spots.
"For current smartphones, we predict the surface temperature to be reduced by several degrees, although this will vary depending on a variety of factors such as the internal structure of the smartphone," a Fujitsu spokesman said via email.The heat pipe could also reduce the frequency of automatic restrictions that smartphone CPUs apply when temperature is expected to rise, the spokesman added, meaning CPUs could work unhindered more often.
Fujitsu aims to commercialize the technology, which can be customized for different mobile device designs, by early 2018. It's also looking into uses in communications, medical and wearable devices.
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