How does the DS dissipate heat?

I was wondering, doen the ds use the game card slot on top of the cpu as a heatsink of some sort? I mean, it would only make sense that would be so, because the system doesn't seem to generate any sort of heat, even in the most demanding situations in games.

 

What if I told you that the DS and 3DS both only have a RF shield as the only thing close to a heat sink. The reason is because they are both ARM chips which are RISC chips, which do not generate nearly as much heat as normal x86 chips

 

No not really. You can get an ARM chip to burn up (see most cell phones, vita can get hot at times). It's just the DS & 3DS used some older chips for the time that were more stable on power consumption and heat.

 

Idk, the n64 had an arm processor and it created a lot of heat. The ds is supposedly even more powerful than the n64, so I would expect at least some kind of heat coming from the system. I guess the older pre release dev kits did before they finalised the cpu, and that could explain why the iris had such a large cpu...

 

Shouldn't it be because these devices were made to have low power consumption and heat dissipation, since they were meant to be used in handhelds?
ARM is just the architecture, so we cannot just be comparing the architectures.

The N64 is so much older. They used older technology to make its chips.

 

No, the N64 had a MIPS processor - a 32 bit bus variant of the MIPS4000. It was also built using a rather old process (350nm, I think), which at least partly explains it's rather high power consumption.

The processors in the DS are newer, fabricated on a more modern and smaller process (120nm, IIRC) and are also running at clock speeds that are significantly lower than the maximum supported by the architecture (this is significant because once you get to more than about 70% of the maximum speed the power consumption goes up much faster than the throughput does).

 

I think that Nintendo did a good job on controlling power consumption and heat on the ds, but one thing I have to bring up is that my 2ds heats up right around the cpu area after playing some games for a while. Kind of strange considering the old 3ds never did and the new 3ds and xl models never did either.

 

it uses a tiny battery, thus indicating the cpu using little power = little heat

 

I can't imagine of any technical reason that the 2DS would be getting hotter - it's got exactly the same CPU cores as the 3DS does. My guess is that it's mechanical - the 3DS has the CPU located underneath the game card slot and hence the heat has to go through a lot before it gets anywhere you can feel it:

CPU -> Lower metal of card slot -> lower plastic housing of game card -> game card PCB -> upper plastic housing of game card -> upper metal shield of game slot - > housing

The path for the heat in the 2DS is a lot shorter:

CPU -> RFI shield -> housing

So it's reasonable to assume that even if the CPU were running at exactly the same temperature the one on the 2DS would feel warmer.

Obviously, this is just a theory.