As the performance target for smartphones keeps going higher, engineers have had to reach for increasingly more elaborate cooling solutions, including active cooling. Infinix has been prototyping a system of its own, dubbed CoolMax.
This is built into a concept gaming phone, so it’s just a preview of what might come. According to the company, CoolMax reduces the temperature of the chipset by 10°C (50°F).
The chipset in question is MediaTek’s Dimensity 9300 with four Cortex-X4 cores instead of the usual one. With the help of CoolMax and an AI management platform, Infinix managed to push the concept device to a record-setting AnTuTu score of 2,215,639.
So, what is CoolMax? It is a combination of a thermo-electric cooler (aka a Peltier module) and a cooling fan. This is the basic construction of those cooler add-ons that you may have seen, but those carry the inefficiency of having the phone’s rear panel between the chipset and the cooler. CoolMax is a built-in solution, so the only thing between the chipset and the cooler is some thermal paste.
Red Magic has become well known for its gaming phones with active cooling. But that setup isn’t quite the same as CoolMax either – Red Magic uses only a fan to push air through a copper duct that carries heat away from the chipset, similar to a PC cooler and fan.
The thermo-electric cooler can in theory drop the temperature more than pure air cooling. The Peltier effect creates a temperature difference – one side of the module is cooler than ambient temperature, the other is hotter. By putting a cooler on the hot side, the temperature of the cool side falls even more.
We mentioned that the Dimensity 9300 has four Cortex-X4 cores, but they are not born equal. One of them runs at up to 3.25GHz, the other three top out at 2.85Hz (and there are four A720 cores at 2.0GHz too). An AI algorithm dynamically moves tasks between the cores so that the most important tasks run on the fast cores, while less time sensitive tasks go to the more power efficient cores.
The concept gaming phone also features a Pixelworks visual processor that helps the Immortalis-G720 GPU by creating additional frames. According to the company, this system can reach 180Hz at FHD+ resolution and 144Hz at QHD+.
Infinix has a gaming phone in the works for later in 2024, though for now details on how close that phone will be to this concept device are kept under wraps.
Before we wrap up, we should mention a couple of other technologies that Infinix demoed at MWC. One is AirCharge, a wireless charging system that works at a small distance of up to 20cm (around 8 inches). This allows the charger to be placed under a desk, whereas typical Qi chargers need to be fairly close to the phone.
The other interesting bit of hardware is the Infinix Extreme-Temp battery. With a new biomimetic electrolyte, the battery can operate in extremely low temperatures – down to -40°C (-40°F).
This will be beneficial even if you don’t live in the arctic, as the endurance of Lithium batteries starts to drop off significantly once temperatures fall below freezing. At -20°C (-4°C), the Extreme-Temp battery has between 50% and 300% higher endurance than a typical Lithium battery.
