How Intel’s Soldered Heat Spreaders Enhance Modern CPU Efficiency

2024-09-05

Intel Shift from Thermal Paste to Soldering in Core Processors

When it comes to CPUs, most users focus primarily on performance and price, often evaluating processors based on their cost-performance ratio. However, from a manufacturer's perspective, these two factors aren't the only important considerations. Power consumption and heat generation are even more critical issues.

As CPU manufacturing processes continue to advance to 7nm, and even down to 5nm or 3nm, the problem of heat generation caused by leakage currents has become the key obstacle to improving CPU performance and energy efficiency. Effective thermal management is the top priority for CPU manufacturers, as excessive heat can lead to a cascade of problems, including the need to throttle the processor, making it impossible to maintain performance.

To address the issue of CPU heat generation, manufacturers need to optimize and improve the manufacturing process to enhance energy efficiency. At the same time, it's essential to focus on improving cooling efficiency. This involves the thermal interface material (TIM) between the CPU core and the metal heat spreader, which is intended to enhance the cooling effect of the CPU core. However, the choice of different materials often leads to varying results in practice.

Currently, there are two main options for thermal interface materials and processes within the CPU: thermal paste and soldering. The former is simpler to apply and more cost-effective, while the latter, which includes both soft soldering and hard soldering, is more complex and costly but offers superior cooling efficiency.

Thermal paste is the most common thermal interface material, known for its ease of use and low cost; however, its thermal conductivity is generally below 10 W/mK. In contrast, soldering materials have a thermal conductivity of around 80 W/mK, with higher-quality options often exceeding 100 W/mK.

In the past few processor generations, from the third to the eighth generation of Core processors, Intel used thermal paste for heat dissipation. However, with the increase in CPU core count in the ninth-generation Core processors, Intel returned to using soldering for thermal conduction.

Return to Solder Thermal Interface Intel's Shift from Thermal Paste to Soldering in Core Processors (2)qch

In its official presentation for the Core i9-9900K processor, Intel introduced the STIM (Solder Thermal Interface Material) technology, which enhances the heat dissipation efficiency between the CPU and the IHS (Integrated Heat Spreader). Faster heat dissipation improves the processor’s thermal management potential, allowing for higher operating frequencies, which benefits both turbo boost and overclocking performance.

What Is Soldering Used for?

Soldering allows you to join a range of different metals together. These include copper, brass, iron, silver, and gold. It is mostly used to make electrical connections and for non-structural metal connections.
Soldering is commonly used to join together the electrical components on circuit boards. Using solder makes it possible to connect these tiny components without using electrical wire.

What Are the Advantages of Soldering?

The biggest advantage of solder is that it is simple to join different types of metal together. It is also possible to easily join components that have different thicknesses.