Why Don’t Cell Phones Need Fans for Cooling?

2024-03-18 02:54:54

Mobile phones are getting more powerful every year, with high-end phones being much more powerful than even mid-range computers and even having more graphics processing power than laptops with integrated graphics cards. However, despite having so many functions, have you noticed that mobile phones do not seem to be equipped with fans for cooling like computers? why? Does it mean that the processor and other components on the mobile phone do not need heat dissipation to operate?

Cell phones are as powerful as computers, so why don’t they need fans?

Moving components require more space and may break

Phone manufacturers have spent years making their products as thin as possible, and if you have to take the fans into account, the phone is definitely not the few millimeters thick you see now. Fans are bulky, require room to operate, and can break quickly if not taken care of. What does “not treat well” mean? This can be summed up for anything you do with your phone, drop it on the couch, jog with it strapped to your wrist, fall out of bed, drop it on the floor, with or without a case. Everything else in the phone is basically fine after the above treatment, but the fan, while it will continue to run, will definitely start to rattle, or it may get worse while running, causing other problems. Components also gradually overheat and fail.

Fans don’t like small spaces

Equipment that relies on fans for cooling usually does not like to be placed in a narrow, warm space, such as game consoles, computers, etc., especially when performing high-intensity operations. If you want to give it a try, you can put the pen If you use the laptop on a pillow, you will find that your body temperature will rise very quickly.

Now, imagine carrying a smaller laptop in your pocket. If it doesn’t get hot enough to draw your attention, it’s likely to shut down at some point. Battery life will definitely take a hit, and the impact on your wallet will be huge.

Mobile CPU consumes less power and generates less heat

When trying to determine the energy efficiency of a CPU, there’s one key term you need to look for: thermal power design. TDP is usually listed in Watts and shows the maximum amount of heat the CPU will generate when running at full load. This doesn’t tell you how much energy the device consumes per hour, but it does give you a more specific upper limit on what to expect.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 This SoC designed for high-end smartphones is the best in its class, allowing you to play the most demanding games. The TDP of this flagship SoC is 12.5W, which is much higher than the 5W of earlier Snapdragon CPUs. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card has a TDP of 450w, which is just one component in a computer. This level of power usage is not feasible for a mobile device that requires a battery, and it also generates more heat than passive cooling can handle, which is why desktops and laptops require fans and you That’s part of the reason why mobile phones don’t need them, and it’s also part of the reason why mobile phones, even though they’ve come so far, still can’t match the graphics capabilities of dedicated gaming PCs.

How can mobile phone CPUs be both powerful and efficient?If you want to learn more, you can check out Cadence PCB Designs of this report. Methods include temperature-aware scheduling (slowing down hot processors in favor of cold processors), traffic throttling (directing network traffic through the die in a way that avoids hot spots), and clock gating (stopping processor logic for a few microseconds at a time). But this only scratches the surface.

Mobile apps generate less heat and require less cooling

Software doesn’t seem to take up physical space, but it does exist in the form of energy, and demanding software has higher energy requirements, as does poorly written code. If an application is constantly pinging the network and constantly asking the background to wake up from sleep, it will cause the device to consume more energy. When you make a mobile app, the impact on battery life is a factor you care about. If running an app causes the phone to need to be charged more frequently, you’ll hear all sorts of complaints from users about this issue, which will hurt the product’s reputation. Energy usage translates into heat, and to keep applications energy efficient, developers proactively reduce the need for active cooling.

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Smartphones use passive cooling

Fans are a form of active cooling. Smartphones rely on passive cooling, using only differences in thermal conductivity between materials to exchange heat without any help from mechanical parts. Simply put, it means that the phone can rely on the metal plate structure between the internal components and the outer shell design to cool down without using anything. Running the air conditioner to cool your home is active cooling. When the weather is hot, turning on the air conditioner at home is active cooling, while opening the windows is passive cooling.

Passive cooling is great for day-to-day use, but unlike active cooling, it doesn’t increase the amount of heat it can remove, which is why some phones get especially hot when performing intensive tasks like gaming. Your CPU generates more heat and the phone lacks the ability to compensate, so thermal throttling kicks in, reducing performance to buy more time for the components to cool.

More alternatives to fans are in development

A small number of mobile phones contain fans. The Lenovo Legion Phone Duel 2 actually comes with two, but that configuration has yet to become mainstream, with smartphone makers looking into other ways to cool smartphones during intensive loads. One option is vapor chamber cooling, which uses the evaporation and condensation of liquid to cool electronic components. For example, the Samsung Galaxy S23 series uses a vapor chamber cooling system, and if you want to go back in time, there’s one on the Galaxy Note 9 Carbon cooling system. Samsung is not alone, here is a video of Xiaomi explaining its Loop LiquidCool technology.

However, instead of placing the fan in the phone, it is better to add it to the back. This is the method Asus uses on the ROG Phone accessory “Aerodynamic Fan”. Mobile phones like ROG Phone 6 use graphite sheets inside because this This material works very well as a thermal conductor. There’s also an AeroActive Cooler 7, so it’s not a one-off design.

Fans are a double-edged sword for mobile phones. They will make the phone bulkier, noisier, and more fragile, but they will also release the performance of the device and make it more powerful. Smartphones continue to advance, using various alternative technologies to allow phones to achieve better performance without fans.

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