- The world was absolutely blown away.
Pun intended.
When Frore Systems came out of stealth after four years
of building a solid-state cooling system that sucks.
Sucks a lot of air.
Look at this thing.
And here we are six months later
with everything basically fully uncovered.
They've got multiple solid-state cooled PCs,
torn down AirJet Minis for us to peek inside,
and they're even teasing a more powerful version
with double the cooling capacity.
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- At risk of sounding offensive,
it doesn't really look like much.
They've got a flat copper bottom that sits on your CPU
or SOC, any heat generating component.
On the top, you've got these kind of paper filters
over the intake, flexible PCB
that goes into their drive system,
and then at the back there's a tapered section
that leads to a skinny little exhaust.
And it's there that the unimpressed completely disappear.
I mean this thing hauls, but they are blowing air
at over 200 kilometers an hour through those filters
and blasting it onto the copper plate.
But here's the thing, moving air is just a means to an end.
It's only part of the battle.
We don't really wanna move air.
What we want to do is remove heat.
Let's take it apart
to see if we can get a better understanding
of just what's going on here.
Okay, I cannot believe they're letting us do this.
Here's the completed cooling module,
which I've shown you already,
and here it is completely torn down
into its constituent components.
It starts with, yeah, this really is just a sticker.
Four little paper filter windows in it.
Okay.
And then we get into what I would call the cooling engine.
It uses piezoelectrics
and we did a full video about this recently,
but basically, a piezoelectric material
vibrates when you apply an alternating current to it.
So what you're looking at in the top
is these intake slits that pull air through those filters.
Okay?
Then out the bottom, they've got all these little jets
that blow down onto, here's the last component,
this kind of crappy flat copper spreader.
I mean, okay, I get it.
You wanna keep this thing thin.
It's just 2.8 millimeters.
And that's critical for getting the design
in thin and light devices like laptops.
But every cooling plate that I've ever seen
that doesn't totally suck has got fins or other structures
to help increase the surface area.
What is going on here?
To find out, we need to go back to the cooling engine
or the cooling chip as they call it.
On the underside, there are 80 small openings
called impingement jets.
They were only willing to let us open up an older prototype
that has twice as many,
but you should still be able to get the idea here.
And these jets are a huge part of the special sauce
that makes this cooling solution so unique.
We've shown many times in the past
that there are diminishing returns
as you blow air faster and faster over a heat sink.
This is because of something called the boundary layer.
Check out this illustration from Wikipedia.
See, no matter how fast your air is moving
sort of near a heat sink fin,
the speed of it is always going to approach zero
as it reaches the actual fin.
And this is due to friction.
What happens then is this creates a blanket
of insulating air that prevents heat
from being removed from the fin efficiently.
Well, what Frore has done is they've used these jets
of super high velocity, high pressure air
to completely obliterate the boundary layer.
This increases effective heat dissipation
by about five times for the same airflow
and functionally saturates the air with heat,
bringing it up to nearly the same temperature
as the copper heat spreader.
Now, an AirJet Mini is good for about
five watts of cooling at room temperature
assuming the dye is at about 85 degrees.
So naturally, I ask them,
"Well, can you just take a bunch of these,
throw them on a vapor chamber?"
And of course, they've already done that.
This Samsung thin and light right here
has been modified with three AirJet Minis
for a total of 15 watts of active cooling
on top of the passive dissipation through the chassis.
Now, they could have put a fourth one on here,
but this machine wasn't designed
in collaboration with Frore,
so they had to improvise a little bit.
And as you can see there's some PCB there
that wouldn't very much like to be chopped off.
This is such a good demo here
because they've got their Frore-modified laptop here
running right next to an unmodified one
showing some key benefits.
So first up, check this out.
Using our thermal camera, we can actually see
that if we look at the exhaust temperature
behind the system, our Frore is at about 41 degrees
while the regular cooler is at about 35.
This can be partially explained
by the heat saturation of the air
like I talked about before.
But part of it is also that our Frore laptop
is running about 10 degrees hotter.
Wait, but that's a good thing.
Let me explain.
In many laptops,
the performance limitation is actually not the temperature
of the CPU or the SOC.
Rather it's because of the external temperature
of the device.
Anything above about 45 degrees Celsius
will eventually burn the user.
So thin and light laptops will already throttle performance
if the hotspot on the bottom exceeds this level.
That is where the AirJet's second big party trick comes in.
Aside from not needing a fan,
it is extremely high static pressure.
Frore Systems claims that an AirJet Mini
manages about 10 times the static pressure
of a MacBook Pro cooler, over 1700 pascals.
That allows it to suck air through restrictive openings
much more effectively than a conventional fan,
which improves cooling not just of the CPU
that it's installed on top of, but of the entire system.
So because the skin temperatures
of our two laptops are so different,
the floor system CPU is actually operating
at 33% higher power.
That is gonna have a dramatic impact on performance.
That's why the chip is running hotter.
Another advantage of the high static pressure
is dust resistance.
Typically, a laptop can't be both actively cooled
and dustproof unless you create a separate compartment
for the fan and heat sink.
Kind of like what they do in some rugged machines.
That is not a great solution for a thin and light.
But with the AirJet, there's the dust filter
that's on the AirJet module itself
and you can also use that pressure,
that suction ability to install dust filters
on the intake of the device without trashing your airflow.
So you could have it pull air through a filter here,
put air through another filter here,
and blow it out the back cooling the entire device.
And the best part, they built in a reverse,
like blast out cleaning solution for the filters,
so they should last five years and beyond
without getting gummed up
even though they're just basic paper dust filters.
This dust resistance is what made the AirJet perfect
for their first commercial product.
the Zotac ZBox Pico with AirJet.
This mini PC is intended to be used on factory floors
where dust and debris could easily clog up
a normal fan-cooled device.
Now in the past, Zotac got around this
by just passively cooling the CPUs in these devices,
but that limited them to a five-watt Celeron processor.
With this dual AirJet Mini solution though,
they can now use a 15-watt Core i3,
which takes them from two cores to eight.
That is a massive performance uplift.
And we can see the difference right behind me
where they've got one of these systems running passively.
This is with the Core i3,
showing how it's thermal throttling to hell.
And then they've got the Frore Systems cooled model
where you can see the performance is a lot better.
And this is still early stages.
They're expecting to be able to get CPU power up a fair bit
by improving the efficiency of the rest of the device.
That is all really impressive
and changes my question from
why did you guys need to be in stealth for four years
to how did you do this at all?
As we saw in our piezoelectric fan video,
ensuring that you hit the resonant frequency
can have a huge impact on performance,
and the thermal expansion of the vibrating membranes
is enough to knock it out of whack.
Meaning that they have to constantly change
the input frequency between 23,000 to 24,000 hertz
to ensure that it's always operating at peak efficiency.
That brings the full power consumption
of each chip to just one watt at full tilt.
That's not bad for five watts of cooling each.
For context, that would allow you to handle a 15-watt system
with two AirJets and would cost you
only about two watts of power for heat dissipation.
That's almost identical to a small fan,
like the one on the steam deck,
which is two and a half watts and takes up more space.
But hold on a second here, Linus. (laughs)
When you guys showed off
that expensive piezoelectric fan a while back,
it had low power consumption, sure, and it was dustproof,
but it had none of these other benefits.
Where was the high pressure?
Okay, I'm getting there.
You've heard me a couple of times
refer to the AirJet as a chip.
Well, I asked them, what makes it a chip?
Like does it have some onboard processing or something?
The answer is no.
But that doesn't make them big liars.
Achieving the kind of one way valve operation
that gives this cooler such high static pressure,
it takes a lot more than just a vibrating tongue depressor
like we saw last time.
So like a chip, the AirJet is precisely manufactured
using photolithography.
The same process as you would use to build a CPU or a GPU.
You coat the cooling engine layer by layer
of photo resist then expose it to light
in etching chemicals and remove the unneeded material.
This is inherently a two-dimensional process.
So the AirJet gets built up one layer at a time
until we have our final little air blaster.
Now, the manufacturing process is a big part of the reason
that the AirJet is only gonna be found in premium devices
at least for the time being
where you can justify that additional cost
with the additional performance that it can unlock.
'Cause see, the thing is
while photolithography is a well understood
and fairly mature manufacturing process,
especially at a relatively macro scale like this,
Frore is working with entirely new non-silicone materials
that required extensive R and D and brand new machinery
to manufacture at any sort of scale.
And high cost isn't the only bad news.
While their demo here does a really good job
of showing how the Frore System outputs less overall sound
than the conventional fan,
I found that the quality of the noise
that it set a bit of a higher pitch,
made it significantly more noticeable.
The good news is that there are clear paths
to resolving at least some of these problems in the future.
While the AirJet Mini outputs laminar airflow
in order to make it quieter, this laptop wasn't designed
with the AirJet Mini in mind and it's blasting that air
at the bottom of this hinge and the bottom of the screen,
increasing turbulence and increasing noise.
They can actually adjust the nozzle
in a device that's built for their cooler
to help alleviate this issue.
And there's more.
The roadmap these guys are showing
looks extremely promising.
When they went out of stealth at CES, they showed what?
The AirJet Mini?
But there's more.
Even at their current manufacturing node so to speak,
they can already build higher performance solutions.
The AirJet Pro is twice the size
and manages to remove twice the heat,
about 10 watts at only 1.7 times the power consumption.
So devices like laptops
could easily have a bank of like four of these
sitting along the back, cooling up to a 45-watt chip
as long as you've got a vapor chamber to spread the heat.
And oh, the best part?
You wouldn't even like need a bottom intake anymore.
So you could put your laptop down on your bed
and it's not gonna overheat
'cause you could just dry air in from anywhere.
That is so cool.
And it can be used on just about anything.
Aside from the computers,
they're showing off LED light fixtures
at like 1/10 the overall volume.
They've got, oh, check this out.
Actively cooled SSDs that are operating at, ow, okay.
That one's really hot, the knot for a cooled one.
Smart like IoT devices,
like wanna overclock your ring doorbell?
With an AirJet Mini,
they figured you could do about eight watts
compared to the 3.3 watts
that is allowed with the passive stock configuration.
I mean what's next?
I'd love to see this thing modded
into an ROG Ally or a Steam Deck.
Too many should do the trick, right Alex?
- Ooh yeah. - Is that a project
you guys wanna see?
Oh, what about in a phone?
I mean there's gaming phones with fans
and water cooling in them already.
Why not this?
Black Shark, RG phone team, you guys up?
And what's really wild
is this is all just with the current gen.
Their material science folks do see a path
to doubling their performance per unit area
every couple of years for the next little while.
We could see thin and light gaming PCs
with 70 class and video graphics in just a few short years.
And I'm not talking the cooling limited ones
that we see today.
I'm talking full performance.
The main levers that they're gonna be using to do this
are higher amplitude vibrations
and higher frequency vibrations, which makes sense.
And so that, combined with if they can bring costs down,
I mean they wouldn't go as far to say it.
See, they're not gonna say it right now,
but when I asked are you guys trying to make fans
just obsolete?
I caught one of their technical guys
nodding in the background, eh?
Yeah.
It's not impossible
that they could even get the cost competitive.
You see, the thing is a motor hub
is always gonna have a fixed cost
'cause of like magnets and stuff.
But if they're able to scale in a Moore's Law kind of way,
well, let me put it this way.
The hard drive industry thought it would always be safe
from low capacity SSDs and they cost so much.
And where are they at now?
Frore says that their process
is similar to TV panel manufacturing
where the larger they can get the mother glass,
the bigger the panels they can build at lower costs.
Well, that sounds pretty good,
given TVs have been one of the only thing
that's been inflation-proof lately.
So right now, yeah, the costs are high,
but that's because they're operating
at a very small manufacturing scale because it's so new.
But that could all change, just like the segue
changed from what we wrote to our sponsor.
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- If you guys enjoyed this video,
go check out our video on the piezoelectric fan
that cost us $1,100.
How far we've come in like six months?
Was that six months ago, a year? Wow.