Wireless powered internals

[SpartanAmy107]

How far away are we from having all a PC's internal components powered by the PSU without a cable? I guess it wouldn't be nessasary until we find a way of getting PCI-E over wireless without loss of performance I guess... 

 

Just my rambling thoughts, cable managing is boring and annoying.

[SpartanAmy107]

1 minute ago, Judd said:

Well, the only accomplishment this would be is having more wires lead into the motherboard and less directly into the expansion hardware. This would be helpful for things like ssds or hdds so they only have 1 cable gone by to it. There are a few downsides to this though.

 

1st If motherboard fails everything may die resulting in everything being ruined.

 

2nd Motherboards would become a lot more expensive.

 

3rd There are still going to be wired going to the motherboard this power these expansion cards.

I don't think you understood what I meant... I mean properly wirelessly powering them, like we can currently do with mobile phones right now.

[FuzzyLogic]

If you're talking about everything being powered through slots, then I'd imagine it would be extremely restrictive in terms of allowing for different form factors, e.g cases would have to make sure all the mounts are in a certain place relative to the motherboard.

If you're talking about using transmitters and receivers, though, that's a bit more feasible. I'd say that wireless data technologies would have to advance a bit more to be able to send that much data through the air, and then what about data corruption and signal degradation? In terms of power... uh... just tell the electrons to move through the air to that exact pad on the graphics card. I'm not sure how that would ever work, because electrons move to the path of least resistance. You could design a pcb that only has one pin for power, and then the internal circuitry divides it up between all the components, but then you would need to make sure the motherboard and other parts are completely insulated.

 

tl;dr lots of complicated stuff, not much gain.

 

Whew, that was a lot.

[SpartanAmy107]

Just now, Judd said:

Wow, I did misunderstand. I see what you are saying now. It would be interesting to see but it would only apply to the ocd or over the top enthusiasts who see a wire a half a centimeter off center creek out.

Indeed, it wouldn't be efficient at all, very little benefits for a lot of power loss, I imagine it being just something to show off at LAN parties... 

[MadModder]

A PC takes a great deal more power than a cell phone, and what you're talking about is a cell phone "charger", which charges the battery in a cell phone. You would need to have a pretty significant electromagnetic field to transfer the energy needed, to "power" all of the components in a PC. I could see perhaps a wireless laptop battery charger being feasible, but trying to actually power the laptop components with an electromagnetic field would be very difficult at this time, and possibly dangerous.

[SpartanAmy107]

1 hour ago, MadModder said:

A PC takes a great deal more power than a cell phone, and what you're talking about is a cell phone "charger", which charges the battery in a cell phone. You would need to have a pretty significant electromagnetic field to transfer the energy needed, to "power" all of the components in a PC. I could see perhaps a wireless laptop battery charger being feasible, but trying to actually power the laptop components with an electromagnetic field would be very difficult at this time, and possibly dangerous.

Yep, I did think it unfeasible with today's technology. But one day?

[LogicalDrm]

Few hundred years according to scifi literature. Maybe first get easier things to wireless like video and data signals.

[SpartanAmy107]

9 minutes ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

Few hundred years according to scifi literature. Maybe first get easier things to wireless like video and data signals.

Do you think that we will have cloud processing first then? Our one CPU at home powering all our devices, whether they are in your home or across the globe?

[Sniperfox47]

11 hours ago, MadModder said:

A PC takes a great deal more power than a cell phone, and what you're talking about is a cell phone "charger", which charges the battery in a cell phone. You would need to have a pretty significant electromagnetic field to transfer the energy needed, to "power" all of the components in a PC. I could see perhaps a wireless laptop battery charger being feasible, but trying to actually power the laptop components with an electromagnetic field would be very difficult at this time, and possibly dangerous.

Qi has been working on a spec for providing 100-2400W of power over longer distances (few inches to a foot) for home appliances so it might not be as far off as you think.

 

Rezence supports wireless charging of laptop batteries and has been supported via Intel's mobile CPUs since Skylake (6th gen). Or rather I'd like to say it supports it but nobody's actually implemented it in a consumer laptop yet, just tech demos and enterprise equipment... It only supports up to 50W though, so not even enough to keep your battery from draining downon anything other than a tiny ultrabook.

[Theguywhobea]

What would the point of wireless PC internals be anyway? The only reason people like wireless cell phone chargers is that you have to plug and unplug a phone several times a day, you don't plug and unplug your GPU or drives several times a day. I get the concept but without a feasible use case why would anyone create it?

[SpartanAmy107]

1 hour ago, Theguywhobea said:

What would the point of wireless PC internals be anyway? The only reason people like wireless cell phone chargers is that you have to plug and unplug a phone several times a day, you don't plug and unplug your GPU or drives several times a day. I get the concept but without a feasible use case why would anyone create it?

Imagine, everything powered without a cable, nothing in the way of installation, no frustration of having a cable too short or far too long. The airflow benefits as cards could be configured however the hell you want... 

[Theguywhobea]

2 minutes ago, SpartanAmy107 said:

Imagine, everything powered without a cable, nothing in the way of installation, no frustration of having a cable too short or far too long. The airflow benefits as cards could be configured however the hell you want... 

I can see the argument for easy cable management (because there is none) but didn't Linus already do a video about how cable management has a negligible effect on case airflow and thermals? I'd still take the reliability of a cable versus the easy install of wireless. IMO

[SpartanAmy107]

Just now, Theguywhobea said:

I can see the argument for easy cable management (because there is none) but didn't Linus already do a video about how cable management has a negligible effect on case airflow and thermals? I'd still take the reliability of a cable versus the easy install of wireless.

I didn't mean due to the cables, but because the PSU, CPU and GPU don't have to be directly connected, they can be spaced further apart meaning no "dirty air" could transfer between them...

[mariushm]

Wireless charging through the air is incredibly inefficient, something like 50-60% efficient in best case scenario ... the device a few mm above the charger, think phone charging on desk surface with charger under some glass sheet or plastic cover on the table, or hidden inside a mouse pad in the case of a device like a mouse (see latest Logitech products)

While qi and other organisations advertise up to 100 watts through wireless charging, again they would be super inefficient, a lot of heat would be produced.

 

A lot of cables in the computers these days are not really a must, but they're there for redundancy, for safety. For example, a 6 pin pci-e cable could deliver the whole 75 watts of power (this is the limit according to pci-e standard) it's supposed to deliver to the video card through just one pair of wires, but they put three there to keep the power losses over the wires small and to account for various degrees of connector quality (for example, what if user buys a cheap chinese (well, other countries could make shit psus as well) power supply with a low quality connector that's loose and makes poor contact with a video card, overheating the pins on the video card and potentially causing a fire? having two pairs of wires make a more sturdy connection, harder to loosen the connector, and 3 pairs is even better, if one pair of wires has poor contacts the others can take up the slack)

 

We have a lot of wires because of low voltages used in computers. Originally, computers used 5v but they also used little power, think 50-80w for 386 and 486 computers, so it made sense to use 5v and up to 10-15 A of current to power such a system. With Pentium 4 and later, everyone moved pretty much anything heavy to 12v in order to reduce the current.

Basically, the higher the current going through a wire, the more losses will be on that wire (wire will heat up, and you have for example 5v on one end but only 4.8v on the other end, 0.2v would be lost on the wire) . If you increase the voltage, you'll send the same amount of power to a device but the current will be lower (voltage x current = power) so fewer wires will be needed.

 

We're mostly stuck with 12v these days because Intel - the ones who made the ATX standard for cases and power supplies - refuses to update the standard and improve power supplies. They're saying motherboard manufacturers should get together and agree with something which will then be accepted by power supply manufacturers and then everyone will be happy. Sadly, nobody has the balls or isn't a big enough player to force everyone to work on a new design.

 

For example, power supplies could add 20v to the voltages they provide to the computer and then instead of providing the CPU with up to 300w through a 8 pin EPS connector, the same power could be provided through a 4 pin or 6 pin connector.

Just the same, the PCI-E consortium (the guys behind the pci-e standards) could for example add a tiny extension to the pci-e slot at the front of it to send a higher voltage like 20v to cards, while keeping the slot backwards compatible with older cards that can only use 12v.  This was done with AGP Pro and various AGP slots and it wasn't really a problem.

Because of the small amount of pins through which power can go in the video card, you can pretty much only send around 80w (around 5A) to a video card through the slot before the slot pins could be damaged. If you add an extension to the pci-e slot, even if it's the same width as the width of the current 12v pins, you could send an extra 100-200 watts to the card.

I mention the 20v number because 20v is already in the standards for usb power delivery, in thunderbolt 3 and so on. Besides the fact that a lot of components in DC-DC converters (the circuits which convert some high voltage like 12v to low voltage like 1..1.3v for gpu and cpu chips can only handle up to 25-30v) There are a lot of electricity standards and regulations which make it harder for power supplies to be sold if their output voltage is higher than 24v and that's one of the reasons this 20v number was chosen. Has to do with electric shock risk and voltage thresholds dangerous for humans (ex. some stupid kid puts tongue on a molex or sata power connector and dies from 12v shock... not really, but with 24v or higher it's possible)

 

However, besides regulations there's nothing in theory that holds someone from using higher voltages in computers. For example, 48v is very common in telecommunications

 

Besides sending power through slots, you could also be clever and send power into devices through other means. For example, most cards you put in a computer you get to screw to the case and basically you have metal to metal contact. That's one of the wires right there, the ground wire, the whole case is a ground. All you would have to do would be to figure out a clever way to add a second contact in that bracket, insulated from the rest of the case, so that when you screw the video card or whatever device you use to the case with 2 screws instead of one, you would create the power connection between the card and the power supply.

It would be a variation on the concept of bus bars where you have two strips of metal one the positive and one the negative and when you attach things to those strips, you take power from the strips.

 

Case manufactures could make the whole back plate on which you screw the motherboard from alternating strips of metal, each connected to power and ground. Motherboard would then simply be screwed onto those strips and pull power from the strips through the screws that hold it attached to the case.  It's not done this way because it's relatively dangerous, for example if someone pours some drink in the computer you'd get short circuits between those strips of metal.  Or maybe someone drops a screwdriver on those strips of metal - the screwdriver could be welded between the strips of metal if the power supply is too slow to turn itself off.

 

With hard drives and other things, it's a bit harder. Yes, power can be send to them the same way for example have ground on one side of the hdd and +12v on the other side of the hdd, but data still has to be sent to the motherboard, and with hard drives or ssd drives you want extremely low latency and high speed, which is super hard to do over the air and inside a case.

So wires would still be required. They could be hidden or cleverly routed but would still be needed.

 

 

 

 

[MadModder]

I can envision a day when your, for example, kitchen appliances no longer would need power cords. You would have some type of local transmitter on the wall/countertop they would receive their power from. The future of computer components I see as more integration. Your PSU would be on the back of the motherboard, and would supply power through the PCB directly to sockets. This would also eliminate the need for power to travel "across" your motherboard, freeing up space for more data lanes, etc., and the need for individual power cables. An M.2 socket is a good example of this, except the power is transmitted across the PCB, and not through it. Then perhaps your PSU could receive it's voltage wirelessly? Still a lot of juice to push through the air, but who would have thought 60 yrs ago that you would be able to carry a telephone in your shirt pocket, and wirelessly communicate with a person on the other side of the planet.     Science!  

[SpartanAmy107]

3 minutes ago, MadModder said:

I can envision a day when your, for example, kitchen appliances no longer would need power cords. You would have some type of local transmitter on the wall/countertop they would receive their power from. The future of computer components I see as more integration. Your PSU would be on the back of the motherboard, and would supply power through the PCB directly to sockets. This would also eliminate the need for power to travel "across" your motherboard, freeing up space for more data lanes, and the need for individual power cables. An M.2 socket is a good example of this, except the power is transmitted across the PCB, and not through it. Then perhaps your PSU could receive it's voltage wirelessly? Still a lot of juice to push through the air, but who would have thought 60 yrs ago that you would be able to carry a telephone in your shirt pocket, and wirelessly communicate with a person on the other side of the planet.     Science!  

Nikola Tesla thought that, his envision of the world was to have power freely distributed from large towers to homes for miles... it took us almost a century to recreate his work on a small scale...

[Stefan Payne]

On 30.9.2017 at 11:20 PM, SpartanAmy107 said:

How far away are we from having all a PC's internal components powered by the PSU without a cable?

Already there in some high performance/Server/Workstation areas.

Linus built something like that some weeks ago, did he not??

 

The Problem with the Wireless shit is:

a) you still need copper to cunduct the power

b) all the stuff neds to be precisely specified and manufactured

 

And that isn't always an advantage!
300W through a PCB isn't that much fun and probably not one bit cheaper than a wired cable.