Heat pipes can have any substance in them that (at the internal pressure) easily goes between the liquid and gas states. However, the only one that I've seen mentioned by name is R134a. That was some Japanese heat-pipe heatsink combo.
I bet the reason that they don't work as well as we would like is that they cannot be tuned on-the-fly like a real refrigeration system can. Take this with a grain of skepticism, because I really don't know for sure! However, I think what is happening is that the heatpipe is tuned for a given temperature and heatload, but the CPU really changes that by a large amount.
Oh, and yes. Quantum computing has been tested and it really works! But, so do many technologies. Right now, quantum computing is too expensive to produce yet. Just because a lab can produce one-off copies doesn't make it practical. You want to spend $12 million on a computer that can only make one computation before it self-destructs and has to be rebuilt? Also, the complexity of the current prototypes is basically nil. They cannot do general purpose stuff yet, only simple tests. That's what Joe is getting at (I'm guessing).
|