Apple Testing Vapor Chamber Thermal Tech For Next-Gen iPhone, Kuo Says (appleinsider.com) 49
Noted TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo in a report on Friday said recent industry surveys indicate Apple is "aggressively" testing vapor chamber thermal systems for use in iPhone, suggesting the technology will make its way to the flagship handset in the near future. From a report: Kuo believes Apple is highly likely to incorporate vapor chamber tech into an upcoming iPhone model, though it is not clear if the system will be ready in time for 2021. Generally speaking, vapor chamber (VC) technology involves evaporation of a liquid (typically water) within a specialized heat pipe or heat retention structure that snakes its way through a device chassis. Heat from processors and other high load electronic components causes the liquid to evaporate into a vapor that spreads thermal energy through the evaporation chamber as it travels to areas of lower pressure. Fins or other condenser bodies remove heat from the vapor, which returns to a liquid state and is carried back to areas of high pressure through capillary action.
more vaping (Score:5, Funny)
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Someone says "bong" and you think "Trump". If it wasn't for the "2020" part, you'd almost make sense.
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o m g.
real vapor ware
Heat pipes? (Score:3)
Aren't these things called heat pipes? Is Apple using a different word because they want to be different, or is it fundamentally something other than just a heat pipe?
Re:Heat pipes? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Heat pipes? (Score:5, Informative)
Yep, same thing. I remember some years ago when they were just being ported to laptops and it was big news. Now it's in every laptop except the low-performance ones.
Considering the higher performance of smartphones now, it's probably going the same way as laptops, where all the higher performance models will be using it soon.
Problem with the phones though is they don't have a fan to cool the cool-side radiator. Most phones nowadays just conduct heat to the case, and that's why the shell gets hot when you're watching videos. I don't see how they expect to get much improvement off the heat pipes in something so small - the point of the heat pipe is to move the heat from the processors (where they are not in a place convenient to put a fan) out to the perimeter where there's space for a radiator, a fan, and a case opening. You really don't have any of that in a typical phone - there's no room for a fan, you don't want a case opening, and even the radiator would be taking up space better used by the battery.
All you can do is move the heat from the procs to the case, but most phones already do that. I don't see how a heat pipe can improve that process. I haven't seen a phone yet that has the procs thermal-compounded to the case though - maybe that's the angle they're working on, better thermal contact?
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Sure, better thermal contact. Until the case gets up to the temperature of the CPU you can improve that way. You might eventually have to throw in a pair of insulating gloves though.
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The idea is to spread the heat over a larger portion of the case. The more surface area of the case that the CPU's heat can be spread to the more convection and conduction can work to carry the heat away from the case. This reduces the case's peak temperature and CPU temperature.
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Yep, same thing.
No, same principle, but different thing with very different capabilities. Vapour chambers are far more effective at moving heat, but are more limited in how far they can move them. They are also fare more expensive to manufacture.
But yeah I don't see how this could benefit a phone. A 150W CPU? Absolutely.
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It seems kinda backwards to be trying to put vapor-chamber/heat-pipes into a smartphone because they always want to make the things thinner.
My guess here is that Apple is going to find a way to make the vapor chamber part of the back case, which means there will be large consequences for how they assemble the phone (Eg glass+metal expand at different rates), and phones already get too hot to handle.
Re: Heat pipes? (Score:2)
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wow, hadn't heard of that! I'm surprised it didn't get more press (or did I just miss it?)
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Aren't these things called heat pipes?
No, they are fundamentally different in application even if the principles are similar. Both exist to move heat from one place to another and they both do it via an evaporate condense cycle, but that's it.
Heat pipes evaporate a liquid which travels along a pipe until it is cooled to the point where it condenses and then wicks via capillary action back to the hot heat source. This is great at moving heat over distance, which is why you see the pipes quite long attached with heatsink fins. The longest I've wi
So...a radiator? (Score:3)
This sounds like standard compressor-based refrigeration to me:
vapor chamber (VC) technology involves evaporation of a liquid (typically water) within a specialized heat pipe or heat retention structure that snakes its way through a device chassis. Heat from processors and other high load electronic components causes the liquid to evaporate into a vapor that spreads thermal energy through the evaporation chamber as it travels to areas of lower pressure. Fins or other condenser bodies remove heat from the vapor, which returns to a liquid state and is carried back to areas of high pressure through capillary action.
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Heating and cooling things always involve changing of thermal pressure. The difference is here it's a purely evaporation / condensation system, no additional mechanical energy is used to change the fluid pressure. I.e. this system will only operate in a limited operating range defined by the internal pressure and liquid phase change temperature. I.e. you can't use it to cool below ambient which is precisely what the point of a compressor in a heat pump is.
Difference to Heat Pipe? (Score:5, Informative)
link 1 [boydcorp.com]
link 2 [celsiainc.com]
link 3 [wikipedia.org]
Summary: a heat pipe tends to be highly directional; a vapor chamber is more planar. A heat pipe is for transporting heat from a spreader to a heat sink; a vapor chamber is an advanced heat spreader. One can have both in the same assembly: a vapor chamber that feeds into a heat pipe which goes to a finned heat sink, although that seems unlikely in a phone's form factor.
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Some phones have had heatpipes for years now, mostly gaming oriented ones.
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Some phones have had heatpipes for years now, mostly gaming oriented ones.
2021: we'll hear how Apple invented heat pipes.
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The difference is in the design and dimensions. Heatpipes are round and long and move heat from one part to another typically over distance cooling as they go. The heatflux is low but better than simply attempting to conduct through metal. They are cheap to manufacture and difficult to bring into any kind of good contact with the chip underneath.
A vapour chamber is thin, flat and can be made large in 2 dimensions. They have an incredibly high heatflux, great contact with the source of heat (because they can
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Heat pipes generally have an orientation - they are made with how the device will be used in normal use. So things like computers and such which will likely sit on a desk can use a heat pipe because the orientation is fixed.
This is because a heatpipe is a phase change device, and the hot source collects the liquid and evaporates it, which flows to the cooler fins through the pipe. But it also means the fins have to in general be located higher than the heat source so once the liquid cools down, it becomes a
Just add water? (Score:1)
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Closed loop. So now the phone is going to have to be waterproof on the inside and the outside. Never to be repaired again.
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Ohhh.... (Score:2)
Juicy (Score:5, Funny)
When the battery inflates and the iPhone is about to die will it leave the world with a final squirt and wet their owners.
My $99 Moto E6. (Score:2, Interesting)
Removeable battery
Headphone Jack
SD card slot
Dual SIM
No pre-installed crapware
Why can't a $1600 phone have any of that?
Normies hate choiceful tech and this is why: (Score:2)
Normie customers could not care less and they're mindless airhead fashionistas to whom the very idea of a phone being a "machine" instead of an art object is anathema.
Connectivity options require esthetically horrific concessions like ports, holes and slots which disturb precious smoothness. (I'm not joking and neither are AAPL to the tune of billions of dollars.)
Normies don't think about crapware or care about bloat (let alone understand bloat until their phone runs out of space).
There's a place for phones
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How many OS updates have been pushed?
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... because most of us don’t care about any of that?
I mean, the only ones that matter to me at all, personally, are the “no crap ware” (iphone: check) and maybe dual SIM (rather more interested in eSIM than a dual SIM though, and it’s a peripheral thing - I’ve never really been in a situation where I wanted it thanks to work paying my phone bills, I could just imagine it being handy in some extended travel situations).
So, assuming most iPhone buyers are like me and have similar
Probably years away... (Score:2)
Their SoCs are planned out years in advance, so they'd know they'd need a new form of cooling a couple years before the SoC that needed it was going into devices.. so if the report is right, it's probably 2 years away. It also seems like something they're more likely to need for an iPad Pro than a phone?
Unless it has nothing to do with the SoC and is actually for cooling the battery to allow super-fast charging. Honestly, I'd rather have faster battery charging than a faster SoC at this point.
What....is the point again? (Score:2)
No, the Blu Generation really didn't need a scientific explanation of what a vaporizer is, but I'm struggling to understand what the hell that has to do with an iPhone.
This would be one of those times where a picture is worth 1,000 vape hits.
And Bendgate was entertaining enough, can't imagine how this design will spectacularly fail..."No officer, it's just my phone leaking, I swear..."
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'Heat pipe' is boring and everyone knows you only need that on overly hot power hungry components.
My opinion is that it will just make the over priced product even more overpriced. But the sheep will buy it.
Aggressively (Score:2)
Why is Apple's marketing department leaking R&D work now? Are they losing market share over censorship?
You can tell that it's not an engineer who said "aggressively".
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I expected that fridges will have built-in phones (Score:1)
The really funny thing about this new tech (Score:2)
Heat from processors and other high load electronic components causes the liquid to evaporate into a vapor that spreads thermal energy through the evaporation chamber
So with newer phones there will be actual magic smoke [sparkfun.com] you are not supposed to let out!
Never first (Score:1)
Apple's aggressively copying other people's innovation.
'Been in Video Cards for a Decade (Score:2)
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No, heatpipes have been used in video cards for decades. Vapour chambers are quite different things despite working on the same physics. The have been used in video cards for a year (singular not plural) and not by NVIDIA but rather by AMD's Radeon VII.
gas absorption coolling... (Score:2)