cpu cooling

A short 2001 Tom's Hardware clip that runs Quake 3 on several popular CPU and motherboard combinations of the era, then removes the CPU cooler to see which chips survive. It shows how different processors handle losing their heatsink or fan.

NightHawkInLight shows how to make radiative sky cooling paint from grocery and hardware store materials, including a novel calcium carbonate microsphere synthesis. The paint can cool a surface below ambient air temperature in direct sunlight without electricity.

Technology Connections looks at why awnings disappeared from houses and how effective they are at cutting solar heat gain and cooling costs. It argues they are a simple, forgotten cooling technology.

The second talk in the Mill CPU series by Mill Computing, covering the Belt, the Mill's operand-passing model that replaces general registers. It explains the cost of register renaming in conventional wide CPUs and how the Belt reaches high instruction-level parallelism.

Adam Savage and engineer Kipp Bradford build a compact wearable refrigeration system to keep Adam cool under costumes, modeled on the cooling unit in a NASA spacesuit simulator. It is a long, hands-on build session.

NightHawkInLight shows how to make ultra-white radiative paint that cools surfaces below ambient temperature without electricity. He walks through the research papers and the household-materials process.

A long Mill Computing lecture on the Mill CPU's compiler toolchain, covering the specializer that targets family members, scheduling and latency passes, and the belt. It explains how the compiler handles a wide-issue, exposed-pipeline design.

The first part of Robert Baruch's series on building a 6800 CPU on an FPGA with nMigen, a Python-based hardware description language. It introduces the HDL while implementing a simpler 6800 core.

Technology Connections explains in 33 minutes why thermoelectric (Peltier) cooling is far less efficient than compressor-based refrigeration.

Linus Tech Tips argues that big air coolers beat AIO liquid coolers for most PCs. They compare quietness and temperatures, using the Noctua NH-U12A as the example.

Tech Ingredients shows how to make a homemade radiative cooling paint, with a custom liquid panel that cools below ambient temperature outdoors. The video covers the materials and how to apply the paint.

Scott Meyers explains how CPU caches work and why they matter for performance, covering cache levels, access speeds, associativity, and effects in multithreaded code. The focus is C++ and cache-aware, data-oriented programming.

Ben Eater writes a program in a made-up machine language and walks through the control logic an 8-bit breadboard CPU needs to execute it. It is part of his build-an-8-bit-computer series.

Chandler Carruth walks through tuning C++ performance, from writing benchmarks to analyzing results on real CPUs and compilers. It focuses on small-scale problems such as loop kernels, data structures and algorithms, and on keeping compilers from optimizing benchmarks away.

Geekerwan reviews smartphone CPUs by power efficiency rather than benchmark scores, with test methodology and chapters on Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung and Google chips. It explains why high benchmark scores can coexist with heat and poor battery life.

Tech Ingredients shows how to build a liquid panel with a specialty paint that, placed outside, cools below ambient air temperature. It demonstrates radiative sky cooling.

Gamers Nexus benchmarks how the amount and application method of thermal paste affect CPU cooling. It compares pea-sized dots, thin spreads and large blobs with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut.

Michael Steil's 27c3 talk on reverse engineering the MOS 6502 from die shots into a transistor-level simulation, as in the Visual6502 project. It covers going from chip package to a digital model.

Matthias Wandel tests old and new code on a range of PCs, including a new mini PC, to measure how much faster modern hardware really is. He also shows optimization techniques such as branchless code, with benchmark programs on GitHub.

Cliff Click walks through a small performance example on a modern out-of-order CPU. He covers pipelining, ILP, CISC vs RISC, multicore, and why cache misses and the memory subsystem dominate performance.

Branch Education walks through a semiconductor fab and the dozens of steps used to turn silicon wafers into microchips, with 3D animation. It covers lithography, deposition and etching at a high level.

Ian Cutress interviews Mike Clark, AMD's chief architect of Zen, about his career since the K5, how Zen began and how CPUs are designed. It also covers the future of AMD.

Linus Tech Tips water-cools a 2020 MacBook Air, tearing it down and showing the cooling design along the way. The video shows the gap between the CPU lid and die and how little the stock heatsink does.

Christopher Domas presents research at DEF CON 26 showing a hidden alternate instruction set and undocumented hardware backdoor in some x86 processors, found on a third-party CPU. He uses it to ask how feasible wider hardware backdoors are.

Chandler Carruth shows how to squeeze more performance out of already-optimized C++ code, covering how the CPU executes it. The talk goes into pipelining, branch prediction and speculative execution using benchmarks.

Lex Fridman interviews chip architect Jim Keller about the future of computing, AI, life and consciousness. Topics include CPU design, branch prediction and why imperfect designs often win.

Tech Ingredients builds a larger solar-powered desiccant air conditioner that uses a calcium chloride liquid desiccant with evaporative cooling to cool their lab. The video includes the engineering calculations.

Der8auer tours Hetzner's test lab and shows a custom AM5 server motherboard with the CPU socket rotated 90 degrees, built for rack airflow in their AX52 servers.

An MIT colloquium by Dennis Whyte on power exhaust and first-wall cooling in fusion reactors, including recent innovations and the SPARC and ARC designs.

Retro Game Mechanics Explained shows how the Atari 2600 draws images with almost no video memory, by having the CPU race the CRT beam line by line. It walks through the techniques in detail.

A 36C3 talk on the AMD Platform Security Processor, an undocumented ARM core inside AMD CPUs that runs before the main processor. The speakers present their reverse engineering of its internals.

Tony Heller argues that US thermometer data shows a century of cooling and that NOAA adjusts the record to produce a warming trend.

Gamers Nexus criticizes ASUS over its handling of exploding Ryzen CPUs, overvolting BIOS settings and warranty and support behavior. It re-benchmarks the chips at defaults and argues ASUS eroded customer trust.

Louis Rossmann opens a new MacBook Air and reacts to its cooling design, where the fan does not appear to be thermally connected to the CPU heatsink. He calls it placebo cooling.

Ben Eater's short update announcing his plan to build another 8-bit computer from scratch on camera. It kicks off the breadboard computer series that became widely known.

Lex Fridman interviews legendary chip architect Jim Keller about Moore's Law, microprocessor design, and first-principles thinking. Keller draws on his work at AMD, Apple, Tesla and Intel, discussing instruction sets, transistor budgets, and self-driving.

Jim Keller gives a UC Berkeley EECS colloquium arguing that Moore's Law is not dead. He surveys upcoming technologies and the multiple innovation curves that can keep transistor density and performance scaling.

Casey Muratori's University of Twente guest lecture is a case study in how straightforward code can cut thousands of lines and tens of seconds of runtime down to a few dozen lines running in under a second. It uses concrete examples to show why software is often an order of magnitude slower than it should be.

Matthias Wandel uses anemometer measurements to find where to place a fan to move the most air through a house at night. He finds that placing the fan some distance back from the window works better.

Christopher Domas's DEF CON 26 talk on secret processor registers that vendors reserve for third parties holding trusted keys. He examines how users are locked out of parts of their own CPUs.