Monday, December 30th 2019
Intel to Announce Advanced Cooling Solutions for Project Athena Laptops
According to sources at DigiTimes, Intel will announce its advanced cooling solutions for project Athena thin and light laptops, at 2020's CES. Pushing project Athena to be the finest of all laptop options, Intel wants to give users the ability to have their laptops run even cooler than ever with a new thermal solution that will supposedly enable an additional 25-30% of cooling headroom. The new cooling module will combine two ingredients to make up for a powerful cooling solution - vapor chambers and graphite sheets.
Usually, the cooling modules inside laptops are placed between the keyboard and laptop's bottom shell, where they could utilize only a small space, so thermal management became hard. In contrast, Intel's design is combining the vapor chamber with graphite sheets to create a bigger surface for heat dissipation. The vapor chamber will replace all the current modules and connect to graphite sheets placed behind the laptop screen, where a lot of area is available. Connecting the vapor chamber to the graphite sheet is a laptop hinge, where a graphite cooling solution would pass through. This hints at a complete redesign of laptop hinges, so we can expect to see some creative solutions there as well. Additionally, this design will allow manufacturers to make fanless laptops that use lower-power CPU models, and we can expect to see even slimmer laptop designs than ever before.
Source:
DigiTimes
Usually, the cooling modules inside laptops are placed between the keyboard and laptop's bottom shell, where they could utilize only a small space, so thermal management became hard. In contrast, Intel's design is combining the vapor chamber with graphite sheets to create a bigger surface for heat dissipation. The vapor chamber will replace all the current modules and connect to graphite sheets placed behind the laptop screen, where a lot of area is available. Connecting the vapor chamber to the graphite sheet is a laptop hinge, where a graphite cooling solution would pass through. This hints at a complete redesign of laptop hinges, so we can expect to see some creative solutions there as well. Additionally, this design will allow manufacturers to make fanless laptops that use lower-power CPU models, and we can expect to see even slimmer laptop designs than ever before.
18 Comments on Intel to Announce Advanced Cooling Solutions for Project Athena Laptops
Hope it survives 1000 times of open/closing the laptop
I still have a bad aftertaste of "premium" laptops with worn or ripped in half eDP ribbons (especially on older Zenbooks), and Intel is trying to cook up a contraption of graphite sheets to go through this most vulnerable spot and make an entire cooling system depend on it... :banghead: :banghead: :banghead:
It looks impressive on paper, until the first wave of RMA due to overheating.
How about a cloud or vapor chamber built into enough surface area to actually cool it instead of trying to go through a hinge. Like, I dunno, the bottom of a laptop, so an aluminum base for strength and heat dissipation. But hey, what do I know. 15 inch screen plus bezel offers 66940 sq cm of heat dispersing area in the base. Maybe Intel knows that isn't enough for their 14nm process node........
Laptops used on, say, your lap (amongst other non-flat, non-hard surfaces) are extremely bad designs if they're back-heavy and have a tendency to topple over backwards when the screen is opened to the typical 110-130 degrees.
We've all had or used something like that and the short version is that it totally sucks.