Question AirJet cooling for Laptop chips!

[FlameTail]

Frore secures $100M, collabs with Intel to create a new way to cool processors | TechCrunch

Frore Systems, a startup creating new ways to cool computer hardware, has raised $100 million in a funding round led by Qualcomm and others.

www.google.com

Better Than Fans? New 'AirJet' Chip Promises To Overhaul Laptop Cooling

The San Jose-based Frore Systems claims the new cooling technology can deliver a 50% to 100% increase in performance for laptops without generating much sound.

www.pcmag.com

This is so cool. And Qualcomm apparently invested $100 million so it seems legit.

 

[FlameTail]

The AirJet Mini is a 41.5 x 27.5 x 2.8mm module that can dissipate up to 5.25 watts of heat (while consuming about 1 watts of power),

AirJet Pro is a 71.5 x 31.5 x 2.8mm module that offers up to 10.5 watts of cooling (with power consumption of up to 1.75 watts).

KEY POINT: The AirJet Pro offers 2x the cooling of the AirJet Mini, while consuming less than 2x the power and taking up less than 2x the size.

This is extremely promising for the tech, because it shows it can efficiently scale up in cooling capacity. Perhaps Frore would do well to develop an 'AirJet Max', a single module of which can cool like 50W. If they do that, the days of fans in laptops would be numbered, as it would mean even the beefiest gaming tier laptops can rely wholly on the AirJets for cooling.

 

[FlameTail]

What are the chances we'll see Apple adopt this tech, and how soon?

It is perfect for use in their Macbooks.

I am surprised that Apple isn't involved with Frore though. Intel, Qualcomm and some others all have invested into Frore.

 

[coercitiv]

@FlameTail at some point we're gonna have to start asking the hard question: what's the catch, why aren't bug companies using the product if it's so fit for the purpose? Why do we keep seeing consumer oriented marketing for this tech (like YT videos with modded Macbooks) when the product is not meant for retail?

My first easy guess is price. Second guess would be reliability in certain usage conditions (e.g. dusty environment).

 

[FlameTail]

@FlameTail at some point we're gonna have to start asking the hard question: what's the catch, why aren't bug companies using the product if it's so fit for the purpose? Why do we keep seeing consumer oriented marketing for this tech (like YT videos with modded Macbooks) when the product is not meant for retail?

My first easy guess is price. Second guess would be reliability in certain usage conditions (e.g. dusty environment).

Cost is certainly the issue.

1. The AirJets themselves are expensive.

2. Laptop internals have to drastically redesigned to integrate AirJets.

3. A vapour chamber is necessary to be paired with the AirJets.

All these add COST.

Dust is not a problem. You can install IP68 (dust and water proof) filters on the intakes, and that solves the issue, no problem. But it does make it even MORE COSTLY.

 

[FlameTail]

I wonder what these AirJet chips actually cost though?

Remember that ZOTAC mini PC with 2 AirJet Minis that starts at $499?

 

[yottabit]

What's the big selling point exactly? Quietness? Reliability?

5 W and 10 W devices are commonly passively cooled anyway (Macbook Air)

And from what I've seen so far the power consumption will be an issue. I'm pretty sure fans for even gaming laptops only use a couple watts (a quick scan on digikey showed those radial blower type fans from 0.5 - 3 W) and are dissipating many times more heat

Long term reliability / fatigue failure would be another concern. Accelerated life testing is great but probably no BIG OEM will want to use these on a widespread basis until they've been in the wild for an equivalent period of time to their warranty life.

And then worse, they don't want to risk being supply constrained if they turn out to be not so easy to manufacture with a great yield.

The biggest benefit I think is they are very thin so maybe for tablets it could be good. Due to it being a MEMS device I'm skeptical it vould be scaled up to cool a 105 W GPU but I'd be happy to be wrong!

I understand it would help a Macbook Air from thermal throttling, but the fact that it even thermal throttles (under long heavy sustained load) was clearly a deliberate cost/benefit decision from Apple. The audience for the MBA will be only very rarely effected by that and the MBP is there for anyone that needs better performance. The fans on the MBP barely ever spin up except under the heaviest of loads and even then it's not an annoying sound

Anyways I think there might be high powered handheld/portable devices where this would be seen commercially first (possibly in some industrial or military applications even before consumer). Maybe after a few years it will be developed enough for 15 - 35 W ultrabook consumer format but not much beyond that. That's my prediction.

 

[yottabit]

VR Headsets could probably be a good application too, those are usually very noticeable if a fan kicks in (right in front of your face)

 

[FlameTail]

What's the big selling point exactly? Quietness? Reliability?

Thinness, quietness, compactness

5 W and 10 W devices are commonly passively cooled anyway (Macbook Air)

It can be scaled to cool higher amounts with more several chips.

I'm pretty sure fans for even gaming laptops only use a couple watts (a quick scan on digikey showed those radial blower type fans from 0.5 - 3 W) and are dissipating many times more heat

Whoopsies

 

[FlameTail]

This palm-sized PC might contain the future of gadget cooling

This Zotac Zbox is the first product with Frore AirJet.

www.theverge.com

You have vibrating membranes inside the chip. When they vibrate they create a suction force that pulls air from the top through the dust guard into the inlet vents, and then pushes it down at very high velocities, and that high velocity air impinges on the copper heat spreader at the bottom of the chip. It get saturated with heat by extracting heat from the copper heat spreader and then it exits sideways.

Madhavapeddy says the suction force is so powerful — 1750 pascals of backpressure, ten times that of a fan — that you can make a completely dustproof PC with integrated filters over its only openings.

It’s so powerful it can apparently cool other components in a PC by sucking air past them, with a single AirJet Pro supposedly enough to cool a 15W Steam Deck handheld gaming PC despite offering a net heat dissipation of just 8.75W — the rest of the cooling comes passively because the skin of the device is just that much cooler with the AirJet’s breeze jetting past.

Look at this. This is very interesting. The effective cooling of the AirJet is much higher than it's actual cooling capacity.

Madhavapeddy says some of the lowest-hanging fruit is gaming smartphones, where a single AirJet Mini could make quite a difference. The company’s also prototyped 4K webcams, stick PCs, SSD enclosures, doorbell cameras, and LED light bulbs with the tech inside. While the Zotac PC is the first with an AirJet, he says Frore already has customers planning to announce other products later this year.

Use cases for AirJets

In a Samsung Galaxy Book demo, he showed me a laptop managing higher sustained performance with several AirJets than it does with the stock fan.

Multiple AirJets in a laptop.

 

[yottabit]

Yeah the new crop of gaming handhelds seem like a promising fit as well. I really think mobile/handhelds/wearables would be the "killer app". Once a device gets thick enough to fit a fan I don't see much much point. Most of our bad experiences with fans come from parts bin engineering and poor thermal design. I think more recent efforts like Apple's MBP, Mac Studio and even Nvidia's founder edition cards show great examples of how to do fans right. It's just a lot of OEMs aren't willing to put in the effort to do optimization for acoustic profiles etc

 

[FlameTail]

It’s so powerful it can apparently cool other components in a PC by sucking air past them, with a single AirJet Pro supposedly enough to cool a 15W Steam Deck handheld gaming PC despite offering a net heat dissipation of just 8.75W — the rest of the cooling comes passively because the skin of the device is just that much cooler with the AirJet’s breeze jetting past.

So the AirJet Pro in a Steam Deck is good enough to cool 15W. 8.75W direct cooling and 7.25W indirect cooling by the 'breeze'.

(1) Is this cooling by the 'breeze' additive or multiplicative?

For example let's say you put two AirJet Pros in the steam deck.

Then what's the amount being cooled?

A: (8.75W × 2) + (7.25W × 2)
B: (8.75W × 2) + 7.25W
C: Something else

(2) What about in a laptop chassis instead of the Steam Deck? How much will the 'breeze' cool?

Anybody who has mastered Fluid Dynamics and Thermodynamics?

 

[yottabit]

So the AirJet Pro in a Steam Deck is good enough to cool 15W. 8.75W direct cooling and 7.25W indirect cooling by the 'breeze'.

(1) Is this cooling by the 'breeze' additive or multiplicative?

For example let's say you put two AirJet Pros in the steam deck.

Then what's the amount being cooled?

A: (8.75W × 2) + (7.25W × 2)
B: (8.75W × 2) + 7.25W
C: Something else

(2) What about in a laptop chassis instead of the Steam Deck? How much will the 'breeze' cool?

Anybody who has mastered Fluid Dynamics and Thermodynamics?

Normally at least in Industrial applications heatsinks aren’t rated for one “heat removal rate” but rather rated with a “thermal resistance” which would have the units of deg C / W. Where the deg C is the temperature rise above ambient.

This can account for the fact that the junction temperature limit might be higher or lower. For instance if one device has a max temp of 85 deg C, and another has one of 110 deg C. The 110 deg C device will be capable of dissipating a lot more heat with the same heatsink (convective heat transfer is proportional to the difference in temperatures). It’s also why you need a ginourmous heat sink to get CPU temps down near ambient and practically that’s only possible to do with water cooling

I don’t really understand the claim that it’s rated for some lower number of watts but can cool 15. Maybe more likely that the Steam Deck chassis’s passive cooling was able to handle the rest? Or the steam deck’s max temp limit was higher than whatever temperature they based the claim around

 

[MadRat]

If it works for air then why not fluids?

 

[FlameTail]

I don’t really understand the claim that it’s rated for some lower number of watts but can cool 15. Maybe more likely that the Steam Deck chassis’s passive cooling was able to handle the rest? Or the steam deck’s max temp limit was higher than whatever temperature they based the claim around

Well, it literally says this:

It’s so powerful it can apparently cool other components in a PC by sucking air past them, with a single AirJet Pro supposedly enough to cool a 15W Steam Deck handheld gaming PC despite offering a net heat dissipation of just 8.75W — the rest of the cooling comes passively because the skin of the device is just that much cooler with the AirJet’s breeze jetting past.

My understanding it is that:

1. The AirJet itself is directly removing 8.75W from the AMD APU

2. The remaining 7.25W gets dissipated to the chassis. This gets removed out by the high pressure airflow "breeze" ejected from the AirJet and flowing out through the chassis.

 

[FlameTail]

If it works for air then why not fluids?

This is using piezoelectrics. So I assume a fluid will cause problems with the electric system?

 

[Khato]

My understanding it is that:

1. The AirJet itself is directly removing 8.75W from the AMD APU

2. The remaining 7.25W gets dissipated to the chassis. This gets removed out by the high pressure airflow "breeze" ejected from the AirJet and flowing out through the chassis.

Standard blower fan heatsinks also draw air across the chassis and other components, it's not something unique to the Frore Airjet. Most likely the standard blower fan is more effective in this regard due to higher air volume movement.

It's definitely an intriguing technology, it just fails in power efficiency.

 

[FlameTail]

Also another benefit of AirJets are how light they are!

The AirJet Pro is only 22g!

I don't know how that compared to a fan, but I bet the AirJet is lighter.

 

[FlameTail]

Ok so 3× AirJet can support a laptop of 28W TDP.

And yes it is scalable, as it's not running at max wattage all the time.

 

[Khato]

Also another benefit of AirJets are how light they are!

The AirJet Pro is only 22g!

I don't know how that compared to a fan, but I bet the AirJet is lighter.

Depends on the size and therefore airflow of the fan. 20g on small blower fans is around the 3CFM range. Going up to 50-60g gets to 10CFM. And then 75g or so for gaming-laptop-size 15CFM.

Keep in mind that the majority of the weight in a Frore AirJet implementation is going to be heatspreader. Even a 200mm^2 die wouldn't contact 10% of the surface area of a single AirJet Pro, and the fraction of a millimeter of 'heat spreader' on the bottom isn't going to do much. Just take a look at the nice chunk of copper sitting beneath the two AirJet mini in the Zotac implementation.

 

[soresu]

Just take a look at the nice chunk of copper sitting beneath the two AirJet mini in the Zotac implementation

Isn't that a vapor chamber?

 

[FlameTail]

Isn't that a vapor chamber?

*vapour

 

[Khato]

Isn't that a vapor chamber?

The image in this particular article certainly doesn't look like it - https://www.pcmag.com/news/first-look-zotacs-airjet-pico-tiny-pc-goes-solid-state-to-cool-an-intel Anything other than solid metal would be overkill and further increase costs as well.

 

[soresu]

*vapour

Blame all the American media I consume, it's diluted by British English education 😂

Some taxi driver caught me talking about sidewalks a couple of weeks ago and almost clipped me good for it.

 

[FlameTail]

The image in this particular article certainly doesn't look like it - https://www.pcmag.com/news/first-look-zotacs-airjet-pico-tiny-pc-goes-solid-state-to-cool-an-intel Anything other than solid metal would be overkill and further increase costs as well.

Solid metal vs Vapour Chamber?

How big is the difference?

 

[soresu]

Solid metal vs Vapour Chamber?

How big is the difference?

The latter allows you to basically take a heat pipe from a heat source and extend it to a larger flat surface, which is clearly perfect for the use case of AirJet cooling.

The next best thing would be to design a liquid cooling loop that passes through a planar radiator surface and attach the AirJet's to that.