My day job is being a refrigeration mechanic and have often wondered if this would be possible.
I know that one thing holding computers back from being generally kick-ass is heat generated from themselves, my solution would be instead of adding more fans or the use of lower power consumption parts but to use refrigeration to cool the space were the components are held. One major draw back I can think of is under fault conditions fridges tend to like to ice up, this mixed with electricity wouldn't be good.
Anyway I would be interested in what other people think of the idea.
Its been a 'thing' for geez I dont know maybe 10+ years. I can remember old Celeron A's being under phase change coolers, however long ago that was....
Read this if you're interested in building a unit > http://www.overclockers.com/build-your-own-phase-change-pc-cooling-system/
There are purpose built cases one can buy as well. http://www.ldcooling.com/shop/l/51-ld-pc-v10-phase-change.html
Has still much going against it imho. Power consumption being the biggest factor. Then the cost.
I think when chipdesigner talk about heatproblems, they are referring to big energydensitys on a small space. So the correct statement would be: “Processors create too much heate is a small space, and we dont know how to get it out fast enough!”
This limit is actually the reason for stagnating clock frequencys. Which is not the baddest thing. Of course it would be nice to incerase the freq, but it is also a good thing, that engineers are forced to develop better designs and improve their basic concepts.
Back in the 80286 days, I had an IcePak PC, which was basically a refrigerator with a PC built in. It was capable of 50 MHz, and that was quite the achievement for a 286, that normally had a base clock of 8-12 MHz.
The thing was ridiculously expensive, but at the same time, the performance benefit was also ridiculous. Those were the days when overclocking really mattered... from 10 to 50 MHz, that's a 500 % overclock performance improvement...
What puzzles me, is that people nowadays pay more premium for 5-10 % improvements... yeah...