Thy Tech Computers - Blog

The Fanless Heatsink

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 02:53:25 GMT

The fanless, almost-silent, dust-immune, 30-times-more-efficient Sandia Cooler heatsink is almost ready for prime time. Sandia National Laboratories has announced that two companies — one computer heatsink maker, and one LED light maker — have licensed the technology.

In the Sandia Cooler, the heatsink itself is the fan. It is a cast metal impeller that floats on a hydrodynamic air bearing just a thousandth of an inch (0.03 millimeters) above a metal heat pipe spreader, powered by a brushless motor in the middle. The end result is a cooler that is very quiet and 30 times more efficient than a fan-and-heatsink solutions. The prototype (shown above and in the video below) is 10 times smaller than a commercial state-of-the-art cooler, but has the same cooling performance.

The Sandia Cooler’s silent operation is due to the fact that a fanless design has a lot more flexibility, whereas the fan in a standard air cooler just needs to drive as much air as possible. The Sandia Cooler’s impeller blades can have a geometry that perfectly splits the air at the impeller entrance (in the middle) and rejoins the air flow at the exit (the edges). Fast forward to 3:30 in the video if you want to hear just how quiet it is.

The dust immunity derives from two facets of the Sandia Cooler’s design: a) Because they’re constantly moving at 2000+ RPM, it’s almost impossible for dust to settle on the heatsink’s blades, and b) Centrifugal force drives out any dust from the tiny air gap between the heatsink and heat spreader. This centrifugal force is what gives the Sandia Cooler such massive efficiency, too. In standard heatsinks, the heat exchange surface is covered in “dead air” boundary layer that acts as an insulator; in the Sandia Cooler, the centrifugal force reduces the thickness of this boundary layer by 10 times.

Back in July 2011 we interviewed Jeff Koplow, the engineer who invented the Sandia Cooler. If you’re interested in the technical implementation of the cooler, I strongly suggest you read through his responses.

Moving forward, the Sandia Cooler’s high efficiency (and relatively small size) makes it an ideal replacement for just about every fan-and-heatsink installation in the world. Koplow has estimated that if every conventional heatsink in the US was replaced with a Sandia Cooler, the country would use 7% less electricity. For the most part, these savings would come from air conditioning and refrigeration systems — but for now, it seems like computers and LED lights will be the first devices to receive Sandia Cooling treatment.

In computers, a Sandia Cooler would mean that we could finally cross the 4GHz/150W TDP thermal wall — or build computers that are thinner and quieter. For LED lights, their performance is currently limited by heat dissipation. For small, at-home fixtures, noisy active cooling solutions are obviously not viable — but a silent, highly-efficient, smaller version of the Sandia Cooler would be perfect.

There’s no word on which CPU or LED maker has licensed the Sandia Cooler, but I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough — such technology is too awesome to keep locked up for long.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/131656-the-fanless-heatsink-silent-dust-immune-and-almost-ready-for-prime-time

How to connect your computer to your TV

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 02:37:32 GMT

How Stuff Works - There's something painfully ironic about sitting on your living room couch, just a few feet away from a beautiful widescreen HDTV, watching a movie on your tiny laptop. Yet this is what most of us do when we download movies or TV shows onto our computers.The same goes for showing off our latest digital photos to friends. We all huddle around the 15-inch computer display while the TV screen goes unused. And what about that PowerPoint presentation you just gave at work? Wouldn't it have looked 1,000 times better on the wall-mounted plasma display in the conference room?

There are many compelling reasons why we want to connect our computers to our televisions, especially now that HDTVs are so popular. Everything from movies to photos to work presentations were made for the big-screen experience.

The first personal computers used TVs for monitors, but computer graphics technology quickly outpaced the image quality on standard-definition TVs (SDTVs). The typical modern computer monitor has the ability to display images at a much higher resolution than a regular TV. A computer monitor can display more individual pixels than an SDTV.

Even today, hooking a computer to an SDTV only makes sense if you want to use your computer as a DVD player. If you try to use an SDTV as a monitor, you'll have a hard time getting your full desktop to fit on the screen.

But with the advent of high-resolution, high-definition TVs like flat-panel LCDs, plasma, LCoS, and DLP displays, televisions now make excellent computer monitors. In fact, that's what the manufacturers of PC-based media centers are trying to achieve. The tricky part is figuring out exactly which TVs work with which computers and how to connect them all together.

Keep reading to learn more about bringing your small-screen life to the big leagues.

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/how-to-tech/how-to-connect-computer-to-tv.htm

Android vs. iOS: Which one should app makers bet on?

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 02:20:19 GMT

Geek Wire -
If you could bet on just one mobile platform as an app developer, which would it be? That was my opening question last week when I moderated a panel discussion hosted by University of Washington Professional & Continuing Education, featuring tech veterans from Cisco, Starbucks, Amazon and PopCap Games who teach and advise some of the UW PCE’s technology and app development certificate programs.

This is practically an age-old debate in the tech world at this point, but it’s a good way of getting a sense for the latest sentiments and prevailing attitudes among app developers. For the record, I purposefully didn’t mention Android or iOS in setting up the question, leaving open the possibility of Windows Phone or BlackBerry as an answer.

Continue reading for the answers from the four panelists (who were speaking on their own behalf, not for their respective companies).

Mike Maas, Glenn Dierkes, James Donaldson and Jon David at the UW Professional & Continuing Education panel on mobile, web and game application development.

Mike Maas, software engineer for Cisco Systems and Android app development instructor:

“I got to teach the class because I had invested in Android after I had taken a run at iOS back in 2008. I joked with somebody, I paid full price. I paid a few grand for the privilege of developing for iOS back in the day. Even today with Android there’s a very low cost of entry.

“The flexibility in devices, some people look at it as fragmentation. I look at it as opportunity — more form factors that you could build apps for. I don’t necessarily like the walled garden, I don’t like a lot of things that come with the Apple ecosystem. I like the nature of Android, and I think, in the long run, it will win. Given the amount of activations happening every month, I think that’s pretty clear.”

Glenn Dierkes, Amazon.com software engineer and instructor in Android, iOS and Mac app development:

“I would bet on both still. I think it depends on what you’re trying to go after. In pure number of devices, I think Android will be the winner, but to generate revenue, I think iOS has an advantage. It’s tied in with the app store, and iTunes and so forth, I think it just makes for a better ecosystem for generating revenue. In terms of the pure number of devices, I think Android already wins that, but as far as getting an app into the hands of users, I think iOS has a bit of an advantage there.”

James Donaldson, Starbucks web developer and instructor in open-source web development:

“The great thing about being in the position I’m in is that the web exists for all of these devices. I don’t even view it so much as a mobile platform. I view it as the web is going to be in a lot of different places. It might be on a screen in your car. It might be on a screen in your refrigerator. It might be on a kiosk in a mall. I think in terms of the browser, and the browser exists on all of these devices.”

PopCap's Jon David, Bejeweled franchise director

Jon David, PopCap franchise director for Bejeweled and advisory board member for mobile and web game development:

“iOS, but Android is not something to be ignored by any means. The installed base is growing at such a huge clip that you definitely have to keep an eye on it. But the thing that I’d say, specifically in the games space — this might come as a surprise to some of you, I don’t know — is that the days of making a game, finishing it up, putting a price tag on it, let’s call it two bucks and putting it up in an app store and never working on it again, are over. Games, specifically on the Android platform, do not make a lot of money through the packaged product model. It’s moving squarely to games as services.

“We have this game called Bejeweled Blitz. It does phenomenally well for us. It’s a complete game as a service. Every single day we have a team of people in an office in Belltown that are watching everything going on in the Bejeweled Blitz ecosystem. How are our players responding, what’s our feedback. What are our comments and our ratings in the app store. It is hard enough with the one ecosystem to stay on top of the different generations of iPhones. We’re taking a hard look at Android. But one of our big concerns is, it is so fragmented that to maintain that game as a service, what are we going to do when one particular model of one particular phone, the players aren’t having a good experience? The fragmentation makes it very hard to run an effective game as a service and do the right thing by your players. So, for now, iOS.”

We spent the next half-hour talking about all sorts of other topics, including tips for job candidates, the role of social technologies, HTML5 and Javascript vs. proprietary languages, etc. I’ll post the full video when it’s available.

Read More at: http://www.geekwire.com/2012/android-ios-app-developers-bet/