HP Marries Inkjet and Robotic Technology to Cool Chips

An anonymous reader writes "Extremetech has an article about how H P has decided to use the spraying tech developed for inkjet printers to cool chips -- and has made a robot that'll wander around data centers, detecting too-hot chips and hosing them down." The article notes that the robot needed about 1 hour of training on the room before it would go about the business of chip cooling. The real advance would be if it achieved sentience and went crazy and became a graffiti taggin' super robot, but I digress.

Re:Nice idea, but...

[Afrosheen]

If you're going to get this elaborate, why not just build fancy liquid chip cooling systems that overclockers use all the time into the cases? You could have a whole rack of servers running off of one coolant box. Your datacenter would go from rack after rack of servers to 1 rack of servers, 1 rackspace taken by the cooler, etc. It'd be cheaper in the long run also, judging by HP's pricing scheme for their existing consumables like inkjet ink cartridges.

Oh and there's already a graffitti bot. He's over here!

Obligatory "Read the Article" comment

[doublem]

Guess What? The robot and the ink jet based cooling system are two different things. The robot adjusts the air conditioning in the room, the ink jet based coolant determines the specific parts of the chip that need cooling.

One is on the Macro scale (sorts) and the other is on the micro scale.

The robot will NOT be spraying ANYTHING!

Anyone ever hear of thermal shock?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the main reasons for semiconductor failure over time is thermal shock - when you turn a computer on and off the chips and metal expand and contract, and shorten the life of all electronic equipment. That is why computers are left on all the time.

This plan would expose the equipment to super-megasize thermal shock, and would result in much lower long term reliability.

Either this is a joke, or some engineer didn't do his homework bigtime.