7 ms·
Why is Ivy Bridge so hot?
- tedunangst 14y agoIt doesn't make sense to me that Intel would do this just to save a nickel, unless solder is way more costly than I imagine. I'd like to know if some other aspect of production makes paste more desirable.
- latch 14y agoThe only Ivy Bridge chips that are out are engineering samples. It's good that people are bringing it up, but this is likely just a beta thing. Maybe they wanted to be able to remove the IHS...or maybe they didn't want people to know the final overclocked performance characteristics for some reason.
- Tossrock 14y agoWhat does engineering sample mean? I could go to Microcenter right now and buy a Core i5 3570K right now if I wanted to. Are they selling engineering samples? That seems like a somewhat shady move.
- blazingice 14y agoThe first Ivy Bridge consumer chips are just hitting retailers today (NewEgg just put them on sale ten hours ago). All of the experiments done so far have been on review chips sent out some weeks ago.
- latch 14y agoIt means pre-production, or beta. No, Microcenter is not selling engineering samples..the production chips _just_ became available. I suspect we'll see a new round of testing today/tomorrow that'll hopefully shed more light on this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_sample https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_sample
- mbreese 14y agoI could also be that (if true) using the paste could meet their engineering/temperature requirements and using solder to conduct the heat was overkill. In this case, the only ones that would feel the pinch would be those that overclocked the chips.
- shabble 14y agoThe biggest problem I'd imagine with the direct-soldered die is that it's a much more rigid interface, which means any localised heating is going to put much more mechanical strain on the die. In contrast, the TIM is much more flexible, and the reduced heat transfer might actually work in its favour, by buffering sudden thermal spikes to reduce the cross-die gradient (and thus stress).
- ajross 14y agoWhy not? The harm is to heat dissipation at high clock rates and voltages -- basically to overclockers. The targeted clocks at the performance points they are aiming at don't have any trouble staying in reasonable temperature ranges, so why bother? Lots of this is market based, not technical. The only competitors to Ivy Bridge are from AMD, and frankly don't compete well. There's simply no pressure to produce a "pull out all the stops" max performance chip. They have a comfortable margin even with comparatively poor heat sink designs, so they might as well save the nickel.
- polshaw 14y agoThe logical next step, sadly unexplored, would have surely been to do some testing without the IHS? E: turns out it doesn't really help[0], though that doesn't mean it wouldn't have been better if soldered. 0. http://www.overclock.net/t/1249419/pcevaluation-intel-i7-3770k-temperature-measured-without-ihs http://www.overclock.net/t/1249419/pcevaluation-intel-i7-377...
- Tossrock 14y agoThe takeaway I got from this article is that if I use solder to attach my heatsink to the spreader on my Core i5 2500K instead of thermal paste, I could get a big jump in heat conductivity. Now if only I had the tools to create a solder point that large...
- ghostfish 14y agoThankfully, someone already sells that. http://indigo-xtreme.com/ http://indigo-xtreme.com/
- polshaw 14y agoThe '>20 W/mK' claimed by this method, while a lot better than the 5 W/mK of regular TIM, is still a fair way off the 80 W/mK that the article claimed for a soldered solution.
- reitzensteinm 14y agoDoes anyone know if any commercial CPUs have been packaged factory fused to a heatsink? There are 200W Power 7 CPUs, and they don't have to worry about aftermarket cooling like high end x86 CPU manufacturers do. It seems like it could really make sense there.
- jakeonthemove 14y agoWhy do that when you can take the IHS off and attach the heatsink directly to the silicon? You know, like everyone does on their laptops...
- polshaw 14y agoBecause a solder layer would have much higher thermal transfer rate per area than thermal paste. And the IHS is bigger than the die, resulting in better cooling (because there is more 'bandwidth' (=area) at the point where TIM is used).. which was pretty much explained in the article.
- 14y ago
- ricksta 14y agoCould it be that Intel is making current generation of Ivy Bridge less over-clockable, so when the next generation is due, they just change the thermal conductivity of it, and over-clock it a bit more and call it a new chip?
- philjohn 14y agoNo, the next generation is a "tock" in Intel parlance, which is a whole new microarchitecture.
- K2h 14y agoThanks for mentioning intel tick-tock. I had not heard that before. http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/silicon-innovations/intel-tick-tock-model-general.html http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/silicon-innovations/i...
- discountgenius 14y agoApparently "Ivy Bridge" is NOT the name of a female model.
- SkyMarshal 14y agoOr a Bond girl.