Future Air Coolers Discussion

[TacoSenpai]

A topic I've been wanting to talk about is air coolers of the future.  As many are aware Intel revealed their i9 lineup and AMD countered with their threadripper lineup at computex this year.  These CPUs are going to have a very high core count of 18 and 16 cores respectively.  Not to mention the die size of AMD's threadripper is massive.  So I have to ask how are these things going to be kept cool?  Especially on air?  I think I even saw something where Intel's stock cooler for thier i9's is actually going to be a water cooler.  Is water cooling going to be a requirement going forward now with the way CPUs are going?  Personally I hope not.  While I have had generally good luck with AIOs the risk of a leak, noise, and additional point of failure pushed me to move to to my Noctua cooler on my 1800X. 

 

Then there comes the question of overclocking.  Now I wouldn't expect to get much OC headroom from CPUs with this many cores but trying to cool it I can imagine would be quite a challenge. 

 

So my question I pose for discussion is how or what can we expect to see from air coolers going forward?  Will we see gargantuan heatsinks and fans?

[TVwazhere]

Doubt it, considering thats the extreme side of things. Meanwhile the consumer CPU's are going down in TDP generally speaking (The 8core R7 1700 is only 65w TDP, though the X version is 95w)

[Spuriae]

Large air coolers are still better than AIO's cooling-wise; I don't see anything changing.

[SCHISCHKA]

A modern 8 core can beat a single core pentium4 at overclock and tdp so you are looking at things wrong. New pentiums are 2core 4 thread so quad core will be the norm for a good while. For servers with silly amounts of cores, comes down to total cost. Servers use to have four sockets, this is rare now and Microsoft and Oracle really punish customers with high computing power. Now that we have chips with so many cores you can expect to see quad socket disappear and dual socket get rarer

 

This changes nothing in cooling

[TacoSenpai]

5 minutes ago, TVwazhere said:

Doubt it, considering thats the extreme side of things. Meanwhile the consumer CPU's are going down in TDP generally speaking (The 8core R7 1700 is only 65w TDP, though the X version is 95w)

Yeah there is that.  Though cooler manufacturers are gonna have to do something about that massive ThreadRipper die lol.  I mean I'm sure they will make revisions of their flagship coolers but the surface area would have to be bigger at a minimum I wonder what effects that will have on the flex and strain on the motherboard.

[AHaskin14]

As others have stated, there's not really that much of a difference in the TDP's as there have been in recent years. As for the future of air coolers anyways, I'd like to see more copper. Cryorig just announced copper versions of their coolers and not only will they probably perform better than their original, but they look awesome imo. Combine that with more fan, and heat pipe technologies and coolers will keep getting better.