What does Motorola do that’s that different from Intel?
Do they have extra heat sinks or convection paths?
And wouldn’t add-in boards raise any problems?
The original Apple II computers had no fans, either. My guess is they want to avoid the sound.
One of the reasons that Wintel computers were able to catch up to Mac’s were was that the IBM’s were able to be fitted with a hard drive while the original Mac’s were not. The reason? Steve Jobs refused to put a fan in the Mac because he thought that designs that required fans were not “elegant”. This made the computers less usable for large data sets so and harder to use because you had to load apps from the floppy whenever you wanted to use them.
Now, we get to the cube, which doesn’t have a fan either, guess it’s an “elegant” design… I for one will have to wait and see if they have problems with heat dissipation before I’d buy one. Especially with an ATI 128 video card, the chips on those run hot!
There is a slot on the bottom and a vent on the top. The computer is designed to be coolded with normal air convection.
What does NASA do? There’s no air in space, so fans would be useless. Do the satellites radiate enough heat to keep the chips cool?
Macs might not have any fans, but that doesn’t mean they don’t need one. I rember getting one & putting it on the top.
theres no heat in space either
myself i had a normal PC with a broken fan and never had a problem
I’m no rocket scientist, Ryan, but I do know that while there may not be air in space, there’s generally air in the shuttle, so maybe NASA has fans on board? Or maybe the shuttle has Apples, I dunno.
Hey, 7, thank you for posting a question that I’d wondered about, too, but was too embarrassed to ask. I thought there was probably some “duh” reason, and I’d wish I’d never asked. 
It is relatively easy to design a computer that has no fan. A fan is needed to dissapate the heat generated by the power source. If you design a computer with convection cooling that cools the power source, you do not need a fan. In fact, many computers have fans, but do not need them. The reason that fans are included is because of a scare tactic originally attributed to IBM.
cite:
http://www.geocities.com:0080/SiliconValley/Hills/9267/fuddef.html
When a competitor released a rival pc that did not include a cooling fan (but did not need one), IBM countered not by making a better product, but by scaring people into thinking that their hard drives would melt. Actually, there was no such risk, but eventually public distrust won out, and the rival company started including a fan in the case, even though it was unnecessary. In the case of that computer, all the fan did was add noise, and so many people just cut the power to it. (NOTE: do not remove your fan; it may still be quite necessary). However, the fan was standard since then, lest the teeming millions be scared of computer “meltdown.”
Even if there is air in the shuttle, what does NASA do to dissapate heat from sattelites?
And shame on you, Asmodean! Even in the vacuum of space, electrical resistance produces heat, which, without an atmosphere, is much harder to sink. The only way a satelite could lose heat is by radiating it.
Yes, the Shuttles have air. However, without gravity there is no convection (hot air can’t rise if there is no “up”), so you would need a fan. They sometimes use IBM ThinkPads for running experiments, and doing other non-critical work.
However, I suspect that most of the Shuttle’s electronics are outside the pressurized cabin. And satellites have no air at all. However, there’s no reason to use Pentium chips for these - you have to use space-qualified, radiation-resistant chips anyway, which means chips which are a couple of generations behind. I think you can use the 486 now, but that’s an overkill for most applications. They produce much less heat than processors in today’s CPUs.
Of course, the 486 still produces a fair amout of heat. The electronics box must be carefully designed so that there is a radiative or conductive path from the chip to a radiator, which is a black panel facing away from the sun. Normally there is a conductive path - a metal strip, or sometimes a heat pipe (a pipe half filled with volatile liquid). The radiator just radiates the heat into space.
Thermal design and testing is one of the most difficult aspects of aerospace engineering. Before launch, satellites are tested in thermal vacuum chambers, which simulate the vacuum and temperature of space, to make sure none of the components overheat or freeze.
486 is the only PC that is Space qualified by NASA.
What do they use for mass storage? Hard drives will work upside down or sideways, will they work in weightlessness?
I don’t think there is such a thing as a space-qualified PC. There are space-qualified microprocessors, but I doubt if any of them are PCs in the usual sense. Astronauts use laptops, but since they are not mission-critical, I don’t think they are space-qualified.
As for mass storage, I think those laptops had hard drives, but other than that I haven’t heard of any hard drives used in space. In the old days they used magnetic tape. Now they use some sort of solid state storage (memory chips). You want to minimize moving parts as much as possible, to improve reliability and decrease vibrations. Also, regular hard drives don’t work in vacuum. Look at a spec sheet for one; you’ll find an altitude limit.
Thanks, my mistake. 486 Chip, not PC.
Thanks also for the laptop info.
BTW the Apple II used the 6502. The Commodore 64 used the 6510 (a 6502 with a tape port) and had no fan.
I’m no computer hardware designer, but it was always my understanding that the fan/no fan issue was about the processor’s power consumption. The Motorola PPC chips consume less power than the Pentium-class chips, so there is less waste heat to be dissipated. Apple would therefore have an easier time than the other PC manufacturers at designing a computer that can keep the processor cool without the help of a fan.
If other manufacturers could design a PC without a fan, why wouldn’t they? I would think it would be a big selling point (quieter) and it would also eliminate the cost of the fan. When the iMac DV models came out, Apple really hyped the no-fan concept and some of their ads even claimed no other PC maker could do it.
Of course, that may just be the usual Apple smugness.
-malden
(posting from a quiet, fanless iMac)
I was impressed with networking the two IMacs in the Graphics Department…now if they could just see the Novell printers.
The main reason is because PPC processors tend to run a LOT cooler than Intel, thus, there’s not as much need for a fan. BTW, nowadays, if you severely overclock your Intel chip and don’t have a powerful fan, you’re motherboard WILL melt.
Meh. The more transistors you have, the hotter it’ll get. As die sizes get smaller, transistors get more tightly packed, which produces more heat per amount of area. They’re trying to combat this by reducing the sizes of the transistors, thusly making them generate less heat. Intel have recently begun producing FC-PGA (Flip Chip Pin Grid Array) processors, which feature the actual processor on the top of the chip instead of on the bottom. This allows for more efficient cooling, since the heat from the processor can radiate straight to the heatsink and subsequent dispersal instead of having to pass through the ceramic processor case first.
I can’t wait for the stories about the Hibachi Cube to begin. (Who remembers the Hibachi PowerBook?)
sure there is…there’s an average, balmy 2.3 degrees above absolute zero left over from the Big Bang
7:
First, it’s not just Motorola. In fact, the PowerPCs have been able to operate without a fan for quite some time. The real difference is that Apple designed their own chipset called UMA-2. This reduces the power consumption of the rest of the system considerably.
But to your question: “What does Motorola do different from Intel?” The answer is, “Nearly everything”.
Korzdan:
[quote]
One of the reasons that Wintel computers were able to catch up to Mac’s were was that the IBM’s were able to be fitted with a hard drive while the original Mac’s were not. The reason? Steve Jobs refused to put a fan in the Mac because he thought that designs that required fans were not “elegant”.
[quote]
I love it when people rewrite history… There were a number of reasons why the first Macs weren’t fitted with hard drives. First, at the time, hard disks were luxuries even for PCs. They were very expensive, large, and didn’t offer a significant advantage over floppies (a big hard disk at that time was only 10MBytes). I’m sure that noise and heat dissipation were also factors that kept hard drives out of the early Macs. By the way, the original Macs WERE able to use hard disks - external ones. As the costs and size of hard disks came down, Apple started putting hard disks in their SEs which were the same form factor as the original Mac… and still no fan.
I’ve got three Macs at home, two of them don’t have fans. I wish my G3 MiniTower didn’t have a fan, though it’s still much, much quieter than my DELLs. I think the fan in there is just to cool the power supply which is rated to carry a bunch of add-ons.
handy:
The G4 Cube uses simple convection to maintain an operating temperature below 95° F - that’s cooler than the human body. I think that means they don’t need one…
carnivorousplant:
and
scr4:
http://content.honeywell.com/space/news/release/mot-hi.htm
Rescind:
This is total BS. The PowerPC has a lot more transistors than, say a 486, but runs a lot cooler. There are a number of tricks that chip makers use to keep power consumption low. Certainly, keeping the gate count low is one factor, but it’s by no means the major one.
Well, all I can tell you is that my previous DELL 366 CPi laptop (Pentium II) would get so hot you couldn’t hold it on your lap for fear of searing flesh. I accidentally left a CD-ROM in the drive for a day and it warped the disk. My new DELL 650 with a Pentium III is significantly better, though is still a lot hotter than my buddy’s 450MHz G3 laptop…