Re: Adding a Peltier cooler layer every few 'processing layers' seems doable (@ Ribosome & JP19)
You still have the problem that you have to route round those cooling channels. They are going to take up a lot of space.
I'm surprised that a Peltier device made a lot of sense in 2005.
Looking at the thermal curves for a typical "high performance" Peltier with a 40W throughput and at a temperature difference of 20C, the waste heat is around 120W. That means that with, say, an AMD64 laptop chip of that era with a 35W TDP, you would be getting maybe a 22C temperature reduction in exchange for needing a heatsink which was capable of removing nearly 160W. Three quarters of your heatsink is just going to remove waste heat from the Peltier. If you were just able to plonk that stonking great heatsink down on the CPU, with efficient heat transfer, it would now need to remove only 35W, and so obviously would be running rather colder.
It made a lot of sense when I was cooling CCD devices in the 1980s, though the reason for that was mainly noise reduction, since the actual power involved wasn't that high. Even so, the cooling load on the system increases considerably as a result of the power needed to drive the Peltier, see above. Our first attempt was a miserable failure because the technician entrusted to the thermal design put the Peltier heatsink INSIDE the box with the CCD, thinking that stirring the air round it would be enough. The box got hotter and largely negated the cooling effect. Only when there was a copper block from the back of the Peltier through the box to the heatsink did we see the expected benefits.