There are pretty much two types of computers – one that’s cooled by rotating fans, and one that’s passively cooled. A San Jose, Calif., startup has raised $116 million in hopes of introducing a third method: a delicate electromechanical system that shoots air from a solid chip, and cools with a device that’s thinner and quieter than most fans can manage.
The company is called Frore Systems, the device is called the AirJet, and today it’s no longer just a cool demo at CES. At Computex 2023, Zotac just announced that it will be selling an AirJet cooler mini PC for $499 by the end of this year.
I went to Fore’s headquarters to check it out — and talk to CEO Seshu Madhavapeddy about what’s next.
First, temper your expectations: The “Zotac Zbox PI430AJ Pico with AirJet” isn’t exactly the kind of computer that warms the hearts of gadget lovers. It’s a barebones get-your-own-box SSD designed primarily for edge computing, the Internet of Things, and digital signage—the company’s biggest strong proposition to customers in malls, restaurants, medical clinics, and the like, says Ernest Seo, Zotac’s director of global marketing.
It has a 7W Intel Core i3-N300 processor running nominally at 800MHz, with integrated graphics, 8GB of LPDDR5 memory, HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.4, Gigabit Ethernet, and three 10Gbps USB 3.2 jacks, including DisplayPort 1.4 via USB-C. The finished units will not have the cool clear state you see above: they will be opaque black.
But when it comes to Frore technology, the specifics of this PC are a little off topic. What matters is that Zotac couldn’t quite build it without Frore technology.
Zotac sold previous fanless Picos with slower Intel Celeron processors, but not the Intel Core i3—and that PC’s predecessor, the PI336, was smitten for its inability to maintain peak performance even though Zotac turned its entire case into a finned heatsink.
As I walked into Frore’s headquarters, the company showed me two of its new Picos with and without AirJets, both running in the same infinite loop to stress-test Furmark’s graphics. The non-AirJet rendering was a slideshow that was choppy at barely 1 fps, while others were cracking at 9, 10, or even 11 fps.
As you can see in a few screenshots compared to the FLIR thermal camera, that’s because the AirJet model was actually putting out heat.
Frore won’t let anyone see inside the AirJet just yet, so take the company’s word for how it works for now. This is Frore founder and CEO Seshu Madhavapeddy:
You have vibrating diaphragms inside the wafer. As it vibrates, it creates a suction force that pulls air from the top through the dust guard into the inlet holes, then pushes it down at very high speeds, and this high-velocity air hits the copper heatsink at the bottom of the slide. It is saturated with heat by extracting heat from the copper heatsink and then exiting laterally.
The suction power is so strong—1,750 pas of back pressure, ten times that of a fan—that you could make a completely dust-proof PC with built-in filters over its only vents, Madhavapeddy says. It’s so strong it can apparently get cold last components in a PC by sucking air through them, with a single AirJet Pro supposedly enough to cool a gaming laptop’s 15W Steam Deck despite only providing a net heat dissipation of 8.75W – the rest of the cooling comes in negative because the leather The machine is only cooler with the last AirJet breeze.
(You may notice that the Zotac Pico doesn’t actually have top air vents, because the twin AirJet Minis draw air through vents on either side of them instead.)
I’ll admit it’s a bit hard to understand how vibrating diaphragms can deliver that much air pressure, especially if they only consume 1 watt of power as they do in the AirJet Mini, and Zotac’s Siu admitted to me that the company didn’t. Completely failed testing Frore’s technique. But I’ve certainly seen many AirJets spouting air, felt it with my finger, measured it with a thermal camera, seen it with a Schlieren flow visualization, and heard it with my ears up close. It actually is no Completely silent, but incredibly quiet compared to most any fan I’ve ever dealt with.
Madhavapeddy admits that the AirJet Mini is not suitable for all types of computers. Replacing the fan with an AirJet isn’t easy—it also requires dedicated control circuitry that must be integrated into the system’s motherboard, and an internal design that favors (or easily adapts to) airflow that makes sense. One of the biggest challenges, says Madhavapeddy, is simply getting enough surface contact to make optimum use of the AirJet’s cooling, though this is not unique to the Frore solution.
But on the flip side, AirJet-equipped computers might not only be quieter – they could also be thinner, and/or with more battery space, if they had a simple copper heatsink and AirJet assembly instead of a bunch of heat pipes connected with fans. He points out that adding more AirJets does not increase the device’s thickness.
Right now, probably the most important limitation is that the AirJet simply doesn’t offer as much cooling as competing solutions do, with one AirJet Mini good for about 4.25 watts of cooling, with two required for the Zotac and three for a laptop. The Mini is the only AirJet in production so far, but the company is also working on an AirJet Pro that’s roughly equivalent to the fan in a 13-inch MacBook Pro, and says the technology could easily expand to larger future AirJets as well. In a Samsung Galaxy Book demo, he showed me a laptop that ran higher sustained performance with several AirJets than with a stock fan.
Some of the least hanging fruit are gaming smartphones, Madhavapeddy says, where a single AirJet Mini can make a big difference. The company has also prototyped 4K webcams, stick PCs, SSD enclosures, doorbell cameras, and LED light bulbs with the technology inside. While the Zotac PC is a first with the AirJet, he says Frore already has customers who plan to announce other products later this year.
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