Danish Danamics Bankrupt.

[Calmatory]

heatpipes unfortunately have run their course... not much more performance to squeeze out of them, let's just say that it worked out nicely CPU makers started focusing on power usage; bringing the numbers down certainly helped prevent a burndown, I've tested a Pentium Prescott Dual Core overclocked to 4ghz with a bit of extra vcore... not a pretty sight, if they stayed that course, the current crop of "top" heatpipe HSF would not have stood a chance;

you only have "so" much contact space with the CPU IHS, and now with 6-8 heatpipes that space is full, end of story and development, they can play around with the fin arrangement, but the design of the base has pretty much the same each and every time, but different manufacturers... so we reached a limit. Air cooling can only bring us so far, and while heatpipes are effective for <130W TDP CPUs, overclocking them and expecting superduper performance at low noise levels is just not going to happen.

1) The "bottleneck" isn't heatpipes, rather the contact between the heatpipes and the base and fins.
2) IHS surface area has nothing to do with it. CPU die<-> IHS surface area is much more important, as the W/mm² is WAY higher. We're talking hundreds of percent.
3) Add more fins -> more surface area -> better cooling.

Clever using of copper, silver and artificial diamond will surely get the price up, but allow lots more potential with the coolers. Understanding basic thermodynamics and thermal physics will help with this stuff.