Heat pipes are one dimensional (a pipe), vapor chambers are two dimensional (a square chamber). Most vapor chambers I've seen on GPUs have the chamber attached to lots of small heat pipes on the side though (they even note this in article, in case you feel like reading it).

That said, I assume the main technical breakthrough here is in manufacturing, producing tiny chambers consistently in enough volume for iphones.

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0_____0 3 days ago | parent [-]

Any passive phase change thermal solution is doing the same thing - take thermal energy from one place, and distribute it for dissipation. My point is that the geometric configuration isn't that important, it's doing the same work the same way. Not really worth arguing about, I just suspect that the branding people love that they had a new buzzword in "vapor chamber" to bandy about.

I liked this article from 10 years ago that actually goes into detail about how Fujitsu actually constructed a super-thin heat pipe (really just a very long vapor chamber) https://spectrum.ieee.org/superslim-liquid-loop-will-keep-fu...

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Aloisius 3 days ago | parent [-]

"Vapor chamber" isn't a new buzzword. It's been the name for flat plate heat pipes since the 1970s.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19770025469/downloads/19...

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SenHeng 2 days ago | parent [-]

This thread reminds me of a friend that was dismissive of anything Apple does. “They didn’t invent it”, “they rebranded someone else’s invention”, “maybe they invented it but all those features are just marketing”.

No, he has never used owned or used an Apple product. Not worth his time.

	▲	0_____0 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think your friend spoke a kernel of truth while misunderstanding what Apple do well. It's pretty rare that they come out with something that hasn't been done at small scale previously, but they have insane scale (100s of millions of iPhones sold per model), and a well-developed ability to take cutting edge techniques, as well as some tech that is in development but not ready for prime time, and integrate it and release it in products a year before anyone else can tool up to compete.