Thanks SlashDot14 for this one!
Water-cooled processors, currently the domain of supercomputers, high-end servers, and garage hobbyists, may be about to enter the mainstream.
Hitachi has developed a prototype notebook PC that uses a water-based solution to cool down its Pentium 4 processor and is planning to commercialize the product for corporate users in the third quarter of this year, the company said Tuesday. The faster the processing speed of a chip gets, the more heat it generates, and this can cause trouble if the heat is not dissipated. On notebook PCs this is usually done with an air-cooling system that makes use of a fan bolted on top of the processor. In the prototype machine, Hitachi has adopted a water-cooling system, which the company says works more efficiently and makes less noise than a fan-based system.