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Liquid Cooling and Cooligy

Originally posted by Hemingray
I realize it's not as simple as slapping on a couple extra processors, but from a marketing standpoint they'd be killing themselves with a pricetag that high. Okay, maybe $6,999... ;)
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Its requires much more experience, more people, more R&D, more resources etc.. and also much more time to market, the overall cost comes from both the component costs and what I mentioned above. OK its only 2 extra CPUS and a few mosfets and capacitors, so what, now can you get it working?

Put it this way, IBM can do it for Apple but would it be worth it?
How many machines could they sell with $10k pricetages?

IMO it would be easier to use the power4 instead of the G5 for anything more than 2 cpus.
 
Originally posted by a17inchFuture
Read closely, that wasnt my question.

I wanted IF it WAS announced on teh 28th, is it typical that it would be available for purchase online (not necessarily to receive, as I know that it usually takes some time until they are released a la the mini) immediately, or would it take some time? I know the mini was buy-able almost immediately, so does anyone else know?
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Probably would not be available for sale for a month after announcement and then not delievered for another 2 months (so 3 months after announcement)... that is if Apple stays true to form.

(all speculation, of course)
 
Originally posted by Hemingray
I realize it's not as simple as slapping on a couple extra processors, but from a marketing standpoint they'd be killing themselves with a pricetag that high. Okay, maybe $6,999... ;)
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which is why quad processor systems are not for the consumer market(!)
 
Originally posted by army_guy
That isnt liquid cooling, the term liquid cooling implies the use of a pump, radiator and heat block. That IBM thinkpad thing is basicaly a sort of heatpipe.
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No, liquid cooling doesn't "imply" anything that isn't apparent by the terms "liquid" and "cooling"

In this case, the radiator is the exposed hinge and the pump is one created by the forces of thermodynamics.
 
Originally posted by army_guy
Its requires much more experience, more people, more R&D, more resources etc.. and also much more time to market, the overall cost comes from both the component costs and what I mentioned above. OK its only 2 extra CPUS and a few mosfets and capacitors, so what, now can you get it working?
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It almost sounds like you think Apple is incapable of accomplishing this. I'm sure they've already invested in said people/R&D/resources for quads. The rumors have been surfacing for years. The point is, a $10-15K price tag is simply too high. Apple's more than paid for any R&D on quads they've done or are ever going to do. You're talking about a company with billions of dollars and zero debt.
 
Originally posted by legion
which is why quad processor systems are not for the consumer market(!)
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...yet...

And dual processors are? Five years ago you probably would have said the same thing about duals. Where do you draw the line? A consumer could be anyone from a high school gamer to a person who edits digital video for a living. Then you start getting into "prosumer" and all that.
 
Also I should add you people are assuming a QUAD CPU machine with an AGP slot? These are non existant from INTEL, IBM or SUN and from anyone else for that matter (the mother board just gets too big!!) . The only QUAD cpu MB with an AGP slot will be from TYAN for Opteron (I think there is also another OEM offering a full size MB ie QUAD Opteron/AGP PRO 110 /16 Memory Slots/DUAL SCSI), the application being 3D/EDA/MCAD tools.
 
Originally posted by legion
No, liquid cooling doesn't "imply" anything that isn't apparent by the terms "liquid" and "cooling"

In this case, the radiator is the exposed hinge and the pump is one created by the forces of thermodynamics.
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I suppose but this application would be unable to cool a DUAL CPU + AGP card +chipset + others etc...
 
The QUAD G5 would target a non-existant market in Apple terms and also due to the cost of the machine. Iam baseing my costs on QUAD xeon/Itanium/Opteron(err with the price cuts, otherwise $14000 in CPUS alone for the 800 series 2.2GHz)
 
Another problem is whether the QUAD G5 would be point to point?
The 800 series Opterons cost is high only on that term alone so that $10k is realistic. The only way to produce a so called cheap QUAD CPU machine would be to downgrade the expected specification i.e. QUAD 1.5GHz G5, 8-12 memory slots + shared BUS, few as possilbe HT links, sata drives (not SCSI and no RAID).
 
Some other problems with Quads....

Originally posted by army_guy
The QUAD G5 would target a non-existant market in Apple terms and also due to the cost of the machine.
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People seem to assume that a Quad would be four times faster than a single - even though a Dual is almost never even close to twice as fast as a single on most applications.

This is why quads and higher show up in servers - a server isn't doing one application - it's often doing dozens to hundreds of things at once.

Another issue influencing the price is that a quad needs a much better memory system than a dual. Apple touts how the G5 uses a pair of 64-bit DIMMs to get "128-bit memory". Well - Intel quads usually have 4 to 10 DIMMs clocked in parallel for 256-bit to 512-bit wide memory!

So, a quad would be much higher priced, and much less likely to scale...
 
Re: Some other problems with Quads....

Originally posted by AidenShaw

Another issue influencing the price is that a quad needs a much better memory system than a dual. Apple touts how the G5 uses a pair of 64-bit DIMMs to get "128-bit memory". Well - Intel quads usually have 4 to 10 DIMMs clocked in parallel for 256-bit to 512-bit wide memory!

So, a quad would be much higher priced, and much less likely to scale...
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Intel way of getting that much memory in a 32-bit machine is outdated, slow and cumbersome. Its not 512-bit wide, the objective is to flick through multiple 4GB blocks (4GB blocks for 32-bit CPU) memory performance is pathetic using this kind of technique (it works but its not how I how call an engineers elegant solution). Another reason INTEL wants people to adopt the so called ITANIUM.
 
Re: Re: Some other problems with Quads....

Originally posted by army_guy
Intel way of getting that much memory in a 32-bit machine is outdated, slow and cumbersome. Its not 512-bit wide, the objective is to flick through multiple 4GB blocks (4GB blocks for 32-bit CPU) memory performance is pathetic using this kind of technique (it works but its not how I how call an engineers elegant solution). Another reason INTEL wants people to adopt the so called ITANIUM.
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What *are* you talking about?

It has nothing to do with getting *more* memory in the system, it's for getting adequate bandwidth to/from the quad or octo memory controller.

So, you are saying that if Apple uses 2 DIMMs clocked in parallel to get more bandwidth it's "fast and good", but if IBM uses 4 DIMMs to get twice the bandwidth of Apple it's "outdated and slow".

There are no memory banks, it's a flat 36-bit (64 GiB) memory space - it is not segmented.
 
Originally posted by GetSome681
Personally, I don't know if I'd want a water cooled powerbook. If something goes wrong, it's trashed. Sure this is fine during your year warranty, but what if you accidently mishandle your powerbook, and you accidentally break the water cooling system. You system could be perfectly fine after the accident, but as soon as the cooling system breaks, the powerbook is done for. There's the possiblity for a LOT of unhappy users after their year warranty if this system was not properly implemented with this in mind.
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The TiBook already had a liquid cooling system, it's a sealed metal tube that runs from the processor and video card to the back of the machine. If you get a chance, open one up and you can easily see the tubes. Breaching the system would require an impact where leaking tubes would be the least of your problems.
I wouldn't mind an extended version of this system in a G5 Powerbook.
 
Originally posted by army_guy
That isnt liquid cooling, the term liquid cooling implies the use of a pump, radiator and heat block. That IBM thinkpad thing is basicaly a sort of heatpipe.
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So what would be the difference between the two? Doesn't the heatpipe tech in the TiBook and the Thinkpad use liquid to move heat away from the processor, etc. to the back of the laptop?
 
Originally posted by hulugu
Doesn't the heatpipe tech in the TiBook and the Thinkpad use liquid to move heat away from the processor, etc. to the back of the laptop?
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The heatpipes are actually phase-change devices.

The liquid in the sealed tube boils due to the heat of the CPU. The act of boiling (evaporating) absorbs much more heat for the temperature difference than if the liquid stayed in liquid form.

The hot vapor moves to the far end of the heatpipe, where it condenses back into liquid - giving up the heat that it absorbed when it boiled.

The liquid is then drawn back to the hot end by the capillary action of a wick (or by gravity is some stationary applications), repeating the cycle.

So, the heat pipe cools with a liquid, but vapor is also involved.

Some people like to reserve "liquid cooling" to mean a system where the coolant remains liquid at all times and is circulated by a pump or convection. The coolant in the Cooligy technology is always liquid, and uses a pump.
 
G5 iMacs

Picture this:

a current hemispherical iMac, but with a transparent case and internal illumination, and it's G5 processor (and other heat generating guts) are cooled by a pair of immicible liquids that convect around inside the transparent dome like a lava-lamp!

Now I'd buy that just to watch it crunch SETI units!

Cheers
 
you kno what would be cool....

if there was slushy machine that pumped the frozen goodness over teh processor....

i kno that would never happen but hey we can all dream
 
Originally posted by army_guy
The QUAD G5 would target a non-existant market in Apple terms and also due to the cost of the machine. Iam baseing my costs on QUAD xeon/Itanium/Opteron(err with the price cuts, otherwise $14000 in CPUS alone for the 800 series 2.2GHz)
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r u trolling? Of course there is a market for Apple. It's the same market SGI goes after as well as other high-end companies. Apple's customers can actually afford 4-way servers and workstations. When you are editing or compositing a LOTR type movie, do you think they care more about a $6K workstation or saving cutting their workflow in half?

Apple will go after the low-hanging fruit first and they have the customer base already for those segments that would buy such a PC or Server, so I really don't think it is off the wall. In fact, the 970FX has 3 coherent processor interconnects, allowing it to form an 8-way unified cache SMP computer. So the technology is already there. Apple has the engineering to develop advanced SMP systems. And the 970FX lends itself very well to such connections. OS X is highly threaded and would benefit intrinsically and Apple (as well as Adobe) have already designed their renderers to scale thread wise both up and out.

So for Apps like FCP, SHAKE, and maybe we'll even see Apple release TREMOR (now that they have the hardware for it) a quad PM/Xserve would be great and Apple has a built in market for it.
 
Not necessary ...

Originally posted by GetSome681
Lack of fan noise is not true. You use the water to suck the heat out of the cpu, yet you still need to get that heat out of the water ...
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Not necessary because the water could carry the heat away to a radiator with a much larger surface area than the heat sink clinged on the CPU(s).

With a big enough heat sink, say, the metal chasis (or a modified version of it to improve the surface area), a fan is not necessay.

But then, CPU heat is always not the problem with Macs (or more precisly, Motorola/PowerPC chips), we still have the harddisks and power supply to take care of.
 
Originally posted by nitropowered
Yes, the "liquid" does not have to be water. It can be something that does not conduct electricity. There is such thing as submerged cooling where they submerge the whole motherboard and such into a substance to wick away the heat. Don't quote me on that but I think I read about it. Maybe someone else can help clairify/verify this.
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I read an article about 2 years ago: a group of people in New Zealand submerged a PC motherboard in a non-conductive liquid from 3M and using (I think) nitro filled cooling coils to keep it way cool. They managed to over-clock the Pentium 3 by nearly 800MHz before the system became unstable. Get this, the temperature was something like 30 degrees. Really interesting. Problem was the cost. They submerged the entire motherboard and all the cards in a Styrofoam ice bucket then filled it up. The 3M liquid cost them nearly $2,000 for about 2 gallons and I don't remember about the nitro. Another problem was the pump kept freezing (big surprise?) and the liquid slowly heated up. Cooligy has the right idea with their pump system and I can't wait to see Apple use it. The G5 or Xserve would be a great use for the technology. The problem for notebooks is the heat exchanger. In the current systems the giant heat-sink is spread out over half the machine and the fan turns on when needed. With liquid cooling the fan would need to be on all the time since it would heat up in seconds with such a small loop. Just a thought.
 
Re: Re: Re: Some other problems with Quads....

Originally posted by AidenShaw
What *are* you talking about?

It has nothing to do with getting *more* memory in the system, it's for getting adequate bandwidth to/from the quad or octo memory controller.

So, you are saying that if Apple uses 2 DIMMs clocked in parallel to get more bandwidth it's "fast and good", but if IBM uses 4 DIMMs to get twice the bandwidth of Apple it's "outdated and slow".

There are no memory banks, it's a flat 36-bit (64 GiB) memory space - it is not segmented.
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I disagree the xeon has a 400/533MHz FSB its bottlenecked anyway plus you have to share that between 4 CPUS hence only 133MHz each, not very good is it. All that bandwidth your on about isnt utilised. This doesnt apply to 64-bit machines as there address space isnt limited to 4GB.
 
Water is conductive?

Be more specific?

You dont use tap water in a liquid cooled computer, at the very least you use distilled water but preferably de-ionised water hence non-conductive. However the water WILL become conductive over time due to it being in contact the copper/alluminium hence the coolant must be changed every 4-6 months, I do this via "hot swap the coolant" very easy to do assuming your using appropriate fittings.
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: Some other problems with Quads....

Originally posted by army_guy
I disagree the xeon has a 400/533MHz FSB its bottlenecked anyway plus you have to share that between 4 CPUS hence only 133MHz each, not very good is it.
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All the more reason to have wider memory paths to the north bridge....

And, how does the architecture of Apple's quad PPC970 compare to the Xeon MP systems?

And what about DMA I/O transfers? Those use bandwidth across the north bridge, but never go across the FSB to the CPU. In a server, I/O bandwidth is often as important as CPU speed.


This doesnt apply to 64-bit machines as there address space isnt limited to 4GB.
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Boy, you are confused here....

What does address space have to do with bus speeds, bus width and bandwidth?

Nothing at all.... You're just trying to create another 64-bit myth.

Oh, BTW, the PPC970 isn't even a 64-bit chip in this context.

It's a 42-bit chip, compared to the Pentium 4/Xeon at 36-bits. (The later Moto G4 chips are also 36-bit chips.)

The Pentium4/Xeon support 64 GiB of RAM, they are not limited to 4 GiB.
 
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