6 ms·

Your Future iPhone May Be Stuffed With Wax

59 points by Libertatea 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
annnnd 13y ago
Interesting - one of the few links where the article delivers more than the title promises. How about "dissipating short bursts of heat in mobile CPUs"? Just for HN, of course, where people are genuinely interested in such topics. /2cents
nwh 13y ago
A similar idea is used in practice in a building I'm frequently in. Beads of wax in the concrete floor keep it cool in summer by melting when the temperature rises, and recover overnight when the windows are open and resolidify.
- joezydeco 13y ago
  Some of the larger skyscrapers in my city are cooled using a phase-change material as well: water. A local facility makes ice overnight when energy is cheaper and then pumps the melting cold water into the buildings to assist the air conditioning units.
Pxtl 13y ago
I'm curious how this works long-term. Old computers already have coolant systems that degrade - thermoconductive paste gets brittle and cracks, fans get gummed up. How will this wax work long-term? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpCJzdWxEbQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpCJzdWxEbQ
- GFischer 13y ago
  I believe paste and fans work longer than the average useful lifetime of a PC, I guess planned obsolesence is at work here too...
- joezydeco 13y ago
  Lots of devices have been using wax motors for a long time, like dishwashers and automotive thermostats. It seems the mechanical parts wear out long before the phase-change material breaks down.
ctdonath 13y ago
The point is taking advantage of matter phase transitions: a lot of energy goes into converting a solid into a liquid, without changing the temperature. Ergo, you can dump a lot of heat into something without then having to move the something away fast to keep the heat source cool. Only works insofar as it only takes so much energy to melt the solid (wax, ice, whatever), after which you need to either resume a classic moving-coolant process or otherwise stop generating so much heat and let the now-melted substance cool via ambient surroundings and re-solidify. An interesting variant on this is Coffee Joulies http://www.joulies.com http://www.joulies.com which are metal balls you drop in your too-hot coffee to rapidly cool it to a desirable temperature, then keep it at that temperature much longer than it normally would stay. The initial heat is absorbed to melt the ball's contents, then is re-released back during the reversed phase transition. Kinda neat. A limited solution, but easily quantified and quite applicable to a narrow but popular range of use. I first thought the title's point was Apple would be stuffing the phone's interior with wax to either make it waterproof or further frustrate reverse-engeineering attempts.
- samatman 13y ago
  Joulies do not in fact work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_Joulies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_Joulies Basically, if your vessel isn't insulated, you lose the same amount of heat to the walls and air. The part where they cool your beverage to a certain temperature and then stop cooling it works fine. The part where they retain heat is thermodynamically senseless. Fortunately, when you replace "beverage" with "chip", you have something that cools the chip for awhile and then stops. Hence the article.
  - computer 13y ago
    Why is it senseless? You lose the same amount of heat in joules/sec, but the total heat stored in the system is higher, since there's a buffer in it with a higher volumetric heat capacity than coffee. So unless I'm missing something, it would indeed cool slower in degrees/sec, but the effect is likely very small. (Note however that the extra volume of the ball would slightly increase surface of the coffee, losing slightly more joules/sec)
susi22 13y ago
I'm slightly disappointed by the article. It's a novel and interesting topic but wired fails to explain the details of how this works and doesn't even try to explain the physics behind it. IMO it wouldn't be too difficult, since the idea is actually quite simple and can probably explained to a non-technical reader in a few sentences. In my opinion the Figure A in this PDF really explains it well: http://acg.cis.upenn.edu/papers/ieeemicro13_responsiveness.pdf http://acg.cis.upenn.edu/papers/ieeemicro13_responsiveness.p... (page 3 of pdf)
btilly 13y ago
My first thought at the title was that this would result in the ability for them not to be damaged by water. But it also makes sense as a coolant system.
- mikeash 13y ago
  Same here. Fill every empty space inside the thing with wax, and you have a waterproof phone! Wonder if that would really work.
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    Not the way you'd hope. Without some way to seal it off, you'd have wax dripping out of your phone every time you use it... or charge it. If you do have some way to seal it in, then you've probably solved the waterproofing problem anyway. If you do want a waterproofed iPhone, there are cases out there that claim to be waterproof, e.g. LifeProof. I've not used or tested one yet, though...
6ren 13y ago
I love approaches like this: instead of butting your head against the same limits, look at the whole problem, find a re-frame the problem with a new trade-off that actually the whole problem. Arguably, this is what Clayton Christensen is talking about with "over-shooting": making your product better than it needs to be in some particular dimension, just because that's the way you've always been making it better. But like doing your shopping in a Ferrari, maybe increased horsepower isn't what's really needed. Here, they'll saying that bursty usage (they call it "sprinting") is what is actually needed. I noted this with word-processors - most of the time the PC is idle - and wondered how those cycles could be harnessed. Instead, they say, turn it off. This might be an alternative to many-core - just boost it x100 faster. It can also go the other way, having a much less powerful processor, just super-boosted for when needed. Cheetah would be a good code name for this project.
- nknighthb 13y ago
  It doesn't solve "the whole problem". It won't help with any sort of batch processing, nor with the latest game trying to squeeze every bit of performance out of the hardware. Worse, it may actually encourage bad behavior by applications. We already have problems with applications draining batteries unreasonably fast on mobile devices because they implement features in ways that look "fast enough" interactively, but under the hood are an unnecessary power drain. Now such inefficiencies can be even less obvious! There's a lot more to practical application of this than tossing some wax on a chip.
  - 6ren 13y ago
    The "whole problem" doesn't mean "every problem". It means taking a step back and seeing what the user is really trying to accomplish, and everything that is needed for that problem to be solved - as opposed to myopically seeing just one aspect of that problem. Some extreme examples of whole solutions: Edison establishing a power generator and power line infrastructure, not just a light bulb (Musk's Tesla is doing similar now); Birdseye establishing freezers in supermarkets, not just selling frozen fish. Sometimes, you'll focus on one specific user problem, which can even mean removing features. BTW: I'm taking the term from Crossing the Chasm (Geoffrey Moore). Of course, what you say is true about continuous loads, and also battery drainage for bursty loads. It's not a solution to every usage pattern, and as the article mentions, it's around 10 years away. I love changing problems to see unexpected ways of solving them - even if it does take years to realise the vision.
jnbiche 13y ago
And I was so hopeful from the headline that Apple was adopting the Lua Wax SDK as an official API.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

59 points by Libertatea 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

Interesting - one of the few links where the article delivers more than the title promises. How about "dissipating short bursts of heat in mobile CPUs"? Just for HN, of course, where people are genuinely interested in such topics. /2cents

nwh 13y ago

A similar idea is used in practice in a building I'm frequently in. Beads of wax in the concrete floor keep it cool in summer by melting when the temperature rises, and recover overnight when the windows are open and resolidify.

joezydeco 13y ago
Some of the larger skyscrapers in my city are cooled using a phase-change material as well: water. A local facility makes ice overnight when energy is cheaper and then pumps the melting cold water into the buildings to assist the air conditioning units.

Pxtl 13y ago

I'm curious how this works long-term. Old computers already have coolant systems that degrade - thermoconductive paste gets brittle and cracks, fans get gummed up. How will this wax work long-term? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpCJzdWxEbQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpCJzdWxEbQ

GFischer 13y ago
I believe paste and fans work longer than the average useful lifetime of a PC, I guess planned obsolesence is at work here too...
joezydeco 13y ago
Lots of devices have been using wax motors for a long time, like dishwashers and automotive thermostats. It seems the mechanical parts wear out long before the phase-change material breaks down.

ctdonath 13y ago

The point is taking advantage of matter phase transitions: a lot of energy goes into converting a solid into a liquid, without changing the temperature. Ergo, you can dump a lot of heat into something without then having to move the something away fast to keep the heat source cool. Only works insofar as it only takes so much energy to melt the solid (wax, ice, whatever), after which you need to either resume a classic moving-coolant process or otherwise stop generating so much heat and let the now-melted substance cool via ambient surroundings and re-solidify. An interesting variant on this is Coffee Joulies http://www.joulies.com http://www.joulies.com which are metal balls you drop in your too-hot coffee to rapidly cool it to a desirable temperature, then keep it at that temperature much longer than it normally would stay. The initial heat is absorbed to melt the ball's contents, then is re-released back during the reversed phase transition. Kinda neat. A limited solution, but easily quantified and quite applicable to a narrow but popular range of use. I first thought the title's point was Apple would be stuffing the phone's interior with wax to either make it waterproof or further frustrate reverse-engeineering attempts.

samatman 13y ago
Joulies do not in fact work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_Joulies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_Joulies Basically, if your vessel isn't insulated, you lose the same amount of heat to the walls and air. The part where they cool your beverage to a certain temperature and then stop cooling it works fine. The part where they retain heat is thermodynamically senseless. Fortunately, when you replace "beverage" with "chip", you have something that cools the chip for awhile and then stops. Hence the article.
- computer 13y ago
  Why is it senseless? You lose the same amount of heat in joules/sec, but the total heat stored in the system is higher, since there's a buffer in it with a higher volumetric heat capacity than coffee. So unless I'm missing something, it would indeed cool slower in degrees/sec, but the effect is likely very small. (Note however that the extra volume of the ball would slightly increase surface of the coffee, losing slightly more joules/sec)

susi22 13y ago

I'm slightly disappointed by the article. It's a novel and interesting topic but wired fails to explain the details of how this works and doesn't even try to explain the physics behind it. IMO it wouldn't be too difficult, since the idea is actually quite simple and can probably explained to a non-technical reader in a few sentences. In my opinion the Figure A in this PDF really explains it well: http://acg.cis.upenn.edu/papers/ieeemicro13_responsiveness.pdf http://acg.cis.upenn.edu/papers/ieeemicro13_responsiveness.p... (page 3 of pdf)

btilly 13y ago

My first thought at the title was that this would result in the ability for them not to be damaged by water. But it also makes sense as a coolant system.

mikeash 13y ago
Same here. Fill every empty space inside the thing with wax, and you have a waterproof phone! Wonder if that would really work.
- nknighthb 13y ago
  Not the way you'd hope. Without some way to seal it off, you'd have wax dripping out of your phone every time you use it... or charge it. If you do have some way to seal it in, then you've probably solved the waterproofing problem anyway. If you do want a waterproofed iPhone, there are cases out there that claim to be waterproof, e.g. LifeProof. I've not used or tested one yet, though...

6ren 13y ago

I love approaches like this: instead of butting your head against the same limits, look at the whole problem, find a re-frame the problem with a new trade-off that actually the whole problem. Arguably, this is what Clayton Christensen is talking about with "over-shooting": making your product better than it needs to be in some particular dimension, just because that's the way you've always been making it better. But like doing your shopping in a Ferrari, maybe increased horsepower isn't what's really needed. Here, they'll saying that bursty usage (they call it "sprinting") is what is actually needed. I noted this with word-processors - most of the time the PC is idle - and wondered how those cycles could be harnessed. Instead, they say, turn it off. This might be an alternative to many-core - just boost it x100 faster. It can also go the other way, having a much less powerful processor, just super-boosted for when needed. Cheetah would be a good code name for this project.

nknighthb 13y ago
It doesn't solve "the whole problem". It won't help with any sort of batch processing, nor with the latest game trying to squeeze every bit of performance out of the hardware. Worse, it may actually encourage bad behavior by applications. We already have problems with applications draining batteries unreasonably fast on mobile devices because they implement features in ways that look "fast enough" interactively, but under the hood are an unnecessary power drain. Now such inefficiencies can be even less obvious! There's a lot more to practical application of this than tossing some wax on a chip.
- 6ren 13y ago
  The "whole problem" doesn't mean "every problem". It means taking a step back and seeing what the user is really trying to accomplish, and everything that is needed for that problem to be solved - as opposed to myopically seeing just one aspect of that problem. Some extreme examples of whole solutions: Edison establishing a power generator and power line infrastructure, not just a light bulb (Musk's Tesla is doing similar now); Birdseye establishing freezers in supermarkets, not just selling frozen fish. Sometimes, you'll focus on one specific user problem, which can even mean removing features. BTW: I'm taking the term from Crossing the Chasm (Geoffrey Moore). Of course, what you say is true about continuous loads, and also battery drainage for bursty loads. It's not a solution to every usage pattern, and as the article mentions, it's around 10 years away. I love changing problems to see unexpected ways of solving them - even if it does take years to realise the vision.

jnbiche 13y ago

And I was so hopeful from the headline that Apple was adopting the Lua Wax SDK as an official API.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]