How will cooling work with future motherboards

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The current cooling solution seems limited and I am just a bit worried about future motherboard having inadequate cooling. does anyone know how they plan to combat higher TDP CPU’s?

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The M1 Macbook Pro is probably the future of cooling on laptops. There is a real thermal barrier when CPUs reach 4GHz. Lower clocks speeds and more cores is the design paradigm of the future.

One possibility is that hyper-core devices can shut down hot cores that are exceeding the passive cooling capacity and shift work to idle cold cores. In such cases, hyper-threading would likely only require more cooling when encoding video or audio.

Microsoft is maintaining an ARM version of the Surface Pro (X), especially given most tablets are ARM devices anyway. With the shift of high-end computing to the ARM platform with the Apple M1 chip, Microsoft will likely maintain the SQ1 chip should the market shift from Intel x86 standard.

I expect Intel is going to push the x86 for some time yet. It would be interesting to see what AMD does with their ARM SoC research.

This is where the upgrade-ability of the Framework laptop gains additional value, as it should be possible to switch out an x86 board with whatever replaces x86.

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Say you had a CPU that was hot enough that you couldn’t fit a good cooling solution in the current case. Since heat requires energy, that means that CPU would also be drawing a lot of power. Since you have thermal mass to ride out short-term spikes in heat production, it also means that large draw would have to be somewhat sustained.

All together then, you’d have a CPU that draws enough power that your battery life with the current 55 Wh battery would be terrible. To fix that you’d need a bigger battery, but since there isn’t really any room in the current case, that means a bigger case. With a bigger case, you could fit an even better cooling solution.

I wouldn’t worry about it too much. The direction in mobile processors is for better perf/watt anyways, which would increase your perf for a given TDP anyways.

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