Macbook air heatsink

The design of the heatsink is not uncommon on laptops, especially thin laptops.

If you look closely at the area with the thermal paste, you will see that copper comes in direct contact with the CPU.

The black on the processor portions is likely a material layer. Either for thermal or electrical isolation.

The black part joining the two processor sections is usually a duct. The fan is remote, and airflow through the duct is the cooling mechanism. Some even use a closed loop fluid or gel that transfers the heat from the processor to the end with the fan.

Also keep in mind that most mobile processors are designed to use less power and thus run cooler than their desktop counterparts.

Chas

That is in fact a heatpipe - something that they have alluded to later, but heatpipe technology is common on laptops (especially ones with GPUs and CPUs) - an 'air duct' of that width would do very little in fact!!

There are plenty of descriptions online of how heat pipes work (I won't bore you with the details here) but this is the type of thing that is implemented: http://img.tfd.com/cde/HEATPIPE.GIF

Hope that helps!

Ray