Hello everyone,
It has been a busy year and I for one am worn out. I am going to take the remainder of 2011 off and spend some long overdue, quality family time. I will be resurfacing in the new year refreshed and exuberant. I plan to release a condensed and focused summary of all my previous work to date via www.seabirdadventure.com (http://www.seabirdadventure.com/), and I also plan to apply for a working bench at OUR should a friendly recommendation for membership come my way.
I have been winding things down this year for a while now, making some time, change of direction has arrived and as everyone knows you slow down for a corner, and accelerate out.
I hope to lead a research team in 2012 and rapidly prototype a number of potentials I am playing with. Provided the right individuals are involved and sufficient resources, a period of technological integration and innovation may be born. All open source of course, in service to humanity.
This year I have an early Christmas present for you all... :)
For a while now I have been playing with a new architecture and it is very exciting, it has consumed more of my attention than anything else has managed to capture for a good time. Some of you may have noticed I have gotten distracted from time to time and was in essence, cruising and amusing myself while my subconscious was hard at work.
Sometimes productive, sometimes not. We live and learn, or we do not.
Here is a bang for the buck CPU:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/phenom-ii-940,2114.html (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/phenom-ii-940,2114.html)
You want the Phenom X2 955 Black Edition model because it is excellent value, has an unlocked multiplier for easy overclocking and has the possibility of unlocking two dormant cores to give you more processing power for free (not guaranteed). If you want a guaranteed 4 core capability buy the Phenom X4 955 Black Edition:
Phenom X2 955 BE (http://www.ebuyer.com/198349-amd-phenom-ii-x2-555-black-edition-3-2ghz-socket-am3-6mb-cache-hdz555wfgmbox)
Phenom X4 955 BE (http://www.ebuyer.com/190673-amd-phenom-ii-x4-955-black-edition-socket-am3-3-2-ghz-6mb-hdz955fbgmbox)
Transistor count on a 45 nm Phenom II X4 CPU is 758 million...
Transistor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor)
Bipolar Junction Transistor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_junction_transistor)
CPU (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpu)
You can go for a budget motherboard or an overclockers motherboard, read the many reviews available and make an informed decision. I am planning on an overclocking board to really push the CPU core temps ;)
A large amount of free software is available to accurately monitor the core temperatures as there is a thermal sensor built in, and the BIOS has an over temperature function that will shut your system down at thermal limit and prevent you from cooking your chip, unless you turn it off of course and ride the edge.
HW Monitor (http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html)
Now, processors have thermal limits and to prevent them overheating they are either air cooled or water cooled, mainly. We are interested in the water cooling particularly because it gives us a thermal fluid phase change, water to steam:
Corsair H60 Hydro Series CPU Cooler (http://www.scan.co.uk/products/corsair-cooling-hydro-series-h60-high-performance-cpu-cooler-lga1156-1155-lga775-lga1366-am2-and-am3)
So, the CPU geeks (myself included), are always desperate to vent that heat to atmosphere to allow a higher CPU frequency overclock, instead of dispersing that waste heat I intend to focus it. We can do this by removing the radiator from the cooling system and replacing it with a boiler.
Remember you can also get water cooling blocks for the GPU and the North / South Bridges, increasing processing power via transistor count and higher levels of heat recycling within the system. Not to mention Crossfire capability ;)
CPU water cooling systems use nominal G threads and this is identical to BSP threads, which is good news because it means we can easily manufacture an entire boiler system for our CPU cooler from BSP fittings. All of the necessary safety, monitoring and valve control hardware is available off the shelf and compatible.
G Thread ? (http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=81635)
So, now you use all that heat generated to boil water, and use that steam pressure to generate electricity via turbine conversion. Loop this back to the CPU as an electrical input and you increase efficiency of the power consumption via recaptured and converted waste heat.
Should you wish at this point you can add a Hydro Electro Lytic component and supporting architecture and create hydrogen prime mover instead...
In addition to the mechanical system you can also play with the energetic system. Stressing the CPU cores at maximum is simple using a stress testing program:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime95 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime95)
This is just an initial overview of this architecture and there is so much more to say, but that is for you all to discover amongst yourselves... maybe you might just end up with the most efficient desk top super computer ever...
Happy Holidays 8)
Rob Mason ;D
RM :)
evolvingape :P