News Researchers unveil polymer-based TIM

I do hope intel are paying attention to this.

 

If it's cheap enough, I can't imagine they wouldn't be. In any case it sounds like it would make for a neat marketing line for their top end components anyway. I wonder what the real world differences of this technology would be for applications that are already okay with a solder interface or similar? It sounds like this could be very useful for certain applications where that's difficult, but not quite so significant elsewhere where that isn't a bottleneck.

 

I would prefer that the chips were more efficient and didn't produce so much heat in the first place.

 

You still need to be able to draw the heat away from the components, TIM is used to transfer any heat to the heat spreader which can then be carried away by heatsinks etc....

100% hope so too!!

The downfall of their last two CPU's has been the TIM, when it comes to overclocking the TIM has been proven to be very inefficient at heat transfer to the heatsink and because of that the achievable overclock is capped.

I am still running with my trusty SB 2500k which, when overclocked to 4.8ghz, offers similar (close enough) performance to the throttled OC of either an IB or Haswell CPU, the performance gap is so close, there's no reason for an overclocker to upgrade.

Having a better TIM would allow the cpu's to clock as well as previous generations and offer everyone a reason to upgrade - Intel have lost sales on two generations of CPU's because they saved $0.02 (or less) per cpu on TIM.

 

But they are.

No matter how efficient and cool you make them people will want to bung lots of them together and make something crazy powerful. Titan Z has what... 5,760 CUDA cores?

If someone made chips 90% cooler over night you'd see passively cooled laptops (Like tablets are and the rumoured Macbook Air refresh will be) but you'll also see much more powerful high end rigs with a thermal demand not that different to what we have today.

The difference we have of late is plenty of options for cool passively cooled 'computers'... we just call them smart phones and tablets.

 

It wasn't done to save money.