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One of the basic technologies that modern PCs rely on for CPU and GPU cooling may be making its way to mobile devices, thanks to pioneering work from Fujitsu Laboratories. The organization claims its new design can transfer 5x more heat than existing thin heat pipes, all while adding less than a millimeter to device thickness. The technology could be useful in balancing higher performance devices with their inevitable temperature increases.

Great. What’s a heat pipe?

A heat pipe is a closed-loop structure that relies on the thermal conductivity of its outer surface and the phase transition of an internal liquid to cool a chip.

Let’s unpack that a bit more. The diagram below shows a simple heat pipe:

As the fluid inside the heat pipe is heated, it eventually transforms into a vapor. That vapor travels to the “cool” side of the pipe, where it condenses back into a liquid, flows back into the “hot” side, and transforms into a vapor again. Heat pipes can improve thermal performance significantly when compared with solid metal alone, and are frequently used in laptops and many enthusiast desktop systems.

Why do I want one in my smartphone or tablet?

In the eight years since Steve Jobs launched the original iPhone, smartphone processor power has exploded upwards. The original iPhone used a Samsung 32-bit ARMv11 CPU underclocked to 420MHz. The performance improvements since then are actually difficult to illustrate because not many sites have tested every generation of phone, but Anandtech did run the Browsermark 2.0 test across every Apple phone from the original to the 5S:

The Apple 5S was 5x faster than the original iPhone — as Anandtech’s full article shows, it’s actually a full 9x faster than the iPhone 3GS in a test like Geekbench.

However, this vastly increased performance, screen resolution, and LTE capability all comes at a cost. The chips inside modern phones can generate significantly more heat, even accounting for process technology improvements.

Heat pipes, therefore, are one potent way that manufacturers could reduce hot spots and improve device cooling without needing fans or bulky materials. The one trend that could derail the use of this technology is the industry’s terminal addiction to thinness as the overriding trait of choice in a next-generation phone. Personally, I think the trend has gone too far — I’d rather have a more robust device that doesn’t require a bulky case than a sliver of a smartphone that needs to be wrapped in plastic and rubber — but clearly I’m in the minority.

Fujitsu doesn’t state how much the final heat pipe weighs, but given its dimensions it can’t be much. The company hopes to deploy the technology commercially by 2017, which means it could be ready for smartphones and tablets about the same time as 10nm process technology.