So now we know (at least we think we have a pretty good idea) what Voodoo co-founder Rahul Sood (in the picture), and now CTO for HP's Gaming Business, is working on so hard for the past few months since his company got acquired by HP. Over the week-end we got confirmation on a piece of information we overheard at the HP/Voodoo Media event last April: the Palo-Alto company will ship this Fall a line of laptops (presumably under the Voodoo brand) using Voodoo's water-cooling technology. HP engineers are looking at 8 hours of battery life for these fanless laptops market to the hard-core gamers community.

"The real cool thing about acquiring Voodoo was being able to get a hold of some of their really advanced technologies especially in the cooling space", said an HP staff.

Although this might be the first time HP is coming out with such a design, water-cooled notebooks had been a fact of life for several years now since Hitachi launched its first fanless machine, the Flora Silent notebook, five years ago. Seven years ago, Toshiba also demonstrated what seems to be the first volume production water-cooled notebook which still needed a fan. Finally, earlier this year, HP announced its first liquid-cooled workstation, but that still requires a fan. And of course, Voodoo's claim of fame is to be the first manufacturer to build liquid cooled PCs!

Also, at last week's onHollywood conference we met with HP's PC division CTO, Phil McKinney (if you read French, check out a short version of the interview published in France's business magazine L'Expansion) and got confirmation of a few more things:

1) HP will *not* create yet another brand [there's already Compaq, HP and Voodoo] to fill the performance gap that exists between HP and Voodoo PCs. [It'll probably be a new HP branded line of high performance machines with Voodoo technologies inside]...
2) And the Voodoo brand will not be tied to just making PCs or laptops [meaning, expect to see non PC devices such as high-end/expensive phones, peripherals... coming from the Voodoo team]...
3) Last but not least, Voodoo is a great channel for the technologies developed at HP Labs [read, that before Voodoo HP engineers were frustrated that the cool technologies they were working were found too cost prohibitive to be integrated in the company's mainstream PCs]... It was especially difficult in such a price-sensitive PC market.