Continued:

Yes, it’s Intel’s fault for releasing microprocessors based on such poor architecture that, as speeds ramped up, they were plagued by heat issues. With Intel’s new microprocessor announcements and little time to work on a new line of coolers that would support the chip well, cooling manufacturers can be considered as innocent parties, as they hardly had the time to bring innovative designs to the market. But Intel introduced their Prescott chips early last year and after almost a year at the Consumer Electronics Show; companies still had nothing impressive to deliver. Cooler Master and Thermalright pretty much kept to their standard designs, but just added more copper and slightly different designs than the rest. Thermaltake had bit more optimistic designs than the aforementioned companies, but they weren’t anything exceptional except stylistically. Well, maybe that’s not true. Their heatsinks gained size that can be compared to the extinct dinosaur species. With that, the amount of copper and weight per cooler skyrocketed. And finally, the company utilized 120mm fans. While the changes are there, uniqueness and true innovation is lacking. Why can’t companies come up with something effective and new, as we saw with the heatpipe designs? How about something that will really change the way air-cooling works? Loud heatsinks used to sound like jet engines, but now, they even look like them.

Now that everything is said and done, the future is optimistic for air-cooling. AMD is not having issues with their designs and cooling companies are fine with whatever they are planning in the future. Even in the near future, AMD will most likely keep reduction in heat a serious part of their chip architecture. Plus, we can’t forget AMD’s Cool ‘n’ Quiet technology that works like a charm. Intel, thankfully, admitted to the heat issues that plagued the market. And although they can’t do anything immediately (as it would require serious architectural improvements), hopefully, they have learned something from this mistake. Intel’s 64-bit Prescott is also equipped with Cool ‘n’ Quiet technology, only it’s called "SpeedStep" instead of the name given by AMD. With multi core microprocessors in the foreseeable future, maybe Intel can lower the power input or at least work on the architecture to reduce temperatures; only then will cooling companies can sigh with relief. And while the future of air-cooling seemed to come to an end last year, the market will continue to exist satisfactorily for sometime.

Assuming that CPU temperature and heat output drops considerably with the next generation of microprocessors, cooling manufacturers can go two ways. They can either keep increasing the size of their heatsinks with little improvements in productivity or they can go back to reducing the sizes and be fine with the technologies they have right now. Then again, we can only hope that they might come with something that would actually make the cooling market exciting (something like low-latency memory modules that revived the otherwise dull DDR market).

We have a feeling that companies may not want to go back to more simplistic designs (assuming that microprocessors will allow them to do so) since they won’t be "futuristic" anymore. But at least companies won’t keep adding more copper to the heatsinks and make them heavier then they already are. Seriously though, the idea of adding more copper needs to go away. Cooling companies must develop something that would be like the Pentium M that performs superior to many of Intel’s higher priced counterparts.

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