does the droid (or any smartphone with a cpu) not have a fan?

[velocity92c]

How in the world do the CPUs not melt without fans? I just realized I've never felt any air flow coming from a cell phone so I'm assuming they run without fans.

 

[crspang]

They use heat sinks.

S: (n) heat sink (a metal conductor specially designed to conduct (and radiate) heat)

WordNet Search - 3.0

 

[hookbill]

Can you imagine what that would do to the size of a phone? In theory it's an idea to keep the temp down but not something that could be practically built into a phone.

 

[RW-1]

Remember, your PC memory is passively cooled as well, unless you use active cooling like in my rig

 

[blinden]

it would be terrible. First, it would have to have vents, so, it would essentially vacuum up the lint in your pockets, and it would be loud, you would hear a whirling while you were on the phone.

 

[xliderider]

And it would require battery power to run the fan.

 

[RW-1]

Naah, you could stick a solar call on the back cover for that

 

[dylanthecat]

Or you could download the "Room A/C App" from the market. It will cool a 12x12 room quite well.

 

[infinity8x3]

Bad idea. As any one with a high end gaming pc knows. Fans are usually the first thing to go in a pc and need to be replaced regularly. Heat sinks in theory last forever.

 

[takeshi]

How in the world do the CPUs not melt without fans?

Not all silicon requires fans for cooling. Different chips have different operating specs.

 

[keiichi25]

Also, the processor in a phone is not necessarily a high powered one. Most microcomputing designs for compact computing are vamped around low poer consumption and hence why there are very few high powered apps for phones.

Also, phones and micro devices do not require high powered computing processes, those are left to actual computers. The only reason why computers have all that stuff is the fact that OS demands and just modern day programming for most computers require much more than microcomputing systems need (That, and the fact most modern computer OS and software are written horribly)

While technically, the processing power is higher than previous generations of smartphones and the like, they are closer to what Pentium 1 chips were and those didn't really require a powerful fan, in fact, old x86 systems didn't need more than just a heat sink to do the processing power they did then. With current day technology, we can get Pentium 2 or Pentium 3 level processing power onto room temperature cooled levels. Our current computer processors are now multi-core processors running at much higher speeds than ever before.