A San Jose, California startup has raised $116 million in hopes of introducing [a] micro-electromechanical system that shoots air out of a solid-state chip, cooling with a device thinner and quieter than most fans could manage.
Zotac has just announced it will sell an AirJet-cooled mini-PC for $499 by the end of this year.
temper your expectations: the “Zotac Zbox PI430AJ Pico with AirJet” isn’t exactly the kind of PC that sets most gadget lovers’ hearts aflame. It’s a barebone bring-your-own-SSD box designed primarily for edge computing, Internet of Things, and digital signage — the company’s biggest customers power displays in shopping malls, restaurants, medical clinics and the like, Zotac global marketing director Ernest Siu tells me.
It’s got a 7W Intel Core i3-N300 processor that nominally runs at 800MHz, with onboard graphics, 8GB of LPDDR5 memory, HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.4, Gigabit Ethernet, and three 10Gbps USB 3.2 jacks, including another DisplayPort 1.4 over USB-C
Frore won’t let anyone see inside an AirJet device yet, so you’ll have to take the company’s word on how it works for now.
Hmmm, I’m going to resolve judgement on this one. Might be entirely legit, might have a touch of the Theranos about it. Let’s see
I remember watching this video that explained how it worked pretty neat
Whatever it’s actually doing it clearly delivers some of its promise and it’s already being implemented by OEMs. Nowhere near Theranos, they make bold promises of a long term improvement they may never live up to but for now they have a thing that works at least.
Everything they have said should technically be possible and the main mechanism of its “magic” is completely solid. High speed impingement should be more effective at removing heat from a surface.
I was following the PC Mag videos on YouTube about this. Very interesting area to help computing!
Even if this is not the cutting edge dream machine, it is cool to see those “fans” in action. I really hope they manage to get it to a level where it could cool current laptops
I still doubt if this solution can scale up to tame our 200W+ fire dragons eventually. But for small form factor machines and industrial PCs it looks pretty promising.
Even if it’s not a matter of better thermal performance, just getting rid of that darn fan noise is worth it alone. Though they’re saying thermal performance is greatly better.
The only question would be reliability and replacement cost. You know how long a HSF will last, usually quite a while, and they’re cheap to replace.
From what I gather they haven’t yet scaled it into high power territory yet, I think they said up to 30W dissipation at this point, which is still really good for lower power devices. We won’t be replacing that enormous 300W TDP GPU cooler quite yet.
