Vapor chambers and heat pipes use some of the same physics concepts, but a vapor chamber is significantly more effective for spreading heat across a large area. They’re also harder to manufacture and more complex.

Have you ever seen a CPU or GPU heat sink that has 5-6 heat pipes in parallel because they need to spread the head over a larger area? A vapor chamber is an upgrade over heat pipes in applications that aren’t moving heat from a point to a line.

Don’t be so dismissive. This is actually cool.

Perhaps it's just that in retrospect, it seems a relatively small jump from heat pumps to vapor chambers.

Do you know if the vapor chambers operate at reduced internal atmospheric pressure? Unless I'm missing something, in order to get the liquid-gas phase boundary to a useful temperature, you'd have to bring the pressure down to, idk, 10kPa (boiling point of water is ~50C)? That would complicate manufacturing for sure, and also means that any leaks are catastrophic for your thermal solution.

Also I would be remiss if I did not note that the refrigerant designation of water is R-718.

On one side it’s cool. On the other, it’s a hot chip.