Intel Devil’s Canyon chips NGPTIM is still not efficient
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July 10th, 2014 at 11:58 pm - AuthorAnton Shilov
Intel Corp.’s NGPTIM [next-generation polymer thermal interface material], which was supposed to bring back record overclocking capabilities to the company’s processors is better than its predecessor, but is significantly worse than commercially available thermal interfaces, a new research has found out.
Earlier this year Intel Corp.’s promised that its Core i7-4790K and Core i7-4690K “Devil’s Canyon” microprocessors will have considerably better overclocking potential compared to the original chips based on the “Haswell” micro-architecture released last year thanks to improved thermal interface between the die and the heat-spreader as well as revamped power supply circuity. However, actual overclocking attempts of a Core i7-4790K central processing unit by KitGuru’s reviewer Luke Hill did not reveal any breakthroughs. Apparently, the reason for that is quite simple: the new thermal interface that Intel uses still has limited efficiency.
All Intel processors for desktop computers in the recent 15+ years have featured heat-spreaders (which many call lids) on their dies to protect the latter from damages and enable more efficient heat dissipation. Back in the days Intel soldered dies to heat-spreaders using a special Indium-based alloy, which enabled very efficient transfer of heat. However, starting from the code-named Ivy Bridge microprocessors Intel replaced the solder with a layer of thermal paste, which is considerably less efficient than the previously used alloy.
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