Smartphones are packing ever-more computing power (CPU, Graphics, AI), and that’s all great. However, to truly use that power sustainably, devices need to dissipate the heat generated by all these zero and one state switching inside the processors.
It’s incredibly tricky in extremely compact devices where the electronics are essentially sandwiched between the battery and the display, two elements that are also generating quite a bit of heat.
Typically, some heatsink or heat-transmitting material is put in contact with the processor’s top to conduct the heat away and let it diffuse elsewhere. Instead, high-end phones have replaced that passive material with vapor chamber cooling as a much more efficient solution.
Vapor chambers are enclosed cooling components with liquid inside. When heated, heat energy turns the liquid into a gas (the vapor) which travels away from the processor to the other side of the vapor chamber, where it cools down and turns back into a liquid (condensation).
The condensation releases the heat away from the heat source. The vapor then turns into a liquid that will go back to the processor. It’s much better than simply waiting for an inert piece of metal to transfer heat.
Infinix came up with its own improved vapor chamber design. It’s hard to compare different designs because we typically can’t run them on the same hardware platform as we would with a gaming PC.
However, the illustrations show a large surface area where cooling can occur. That’s a good sign and is typically a key metric to observe. Infinix says it has utilized an advanced “3D” design to increase the overall chamber volume, and it makes sense as the width and length might be limited by the phone’s form factor.
While the principle is relatively simple, building such cooling devices at an extremely small scale is challenging. Minor manufacturing defects could prevent the design from performing as expected. The design theory needs to meet the manufacturing realities.
Ultimately, we need to measure the sustained performance in apps such as 3D gaming or other computationally demanding tasks. In theory, the performance would be less susceptible to drops due to thermal throttling (reducing computing speed to lower the heat).
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