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Intel Gets Serious With Solar-powered CPU Tech
angry tapir writes "Intel's experimental solar-powered processor may have started off as a fun project, but the chip maker is now looking to extend the technology to hardware such as graphics processors, memory and floating point units. Intel last year showed the low-power processor — charged only by the light from a reading lamp — running Windows and Linux PCs. Intel is expected to share further details about the processor, which is code-named Claremont, at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. The company is also expected to reveal information about efforts to integrate wireless capabilities into Atom chips for mobile devices."
Yes Intel did demo a solar cell powering a Pentium, but that was merely to make a point about the inefficiencies of near-threshold voltage (NTV) CPUs. They have no particular focus on Solar powered processors.
Near-threshold voltage (NTV) CPUs are the focus of Intel's research here.
NTV transistors can switch at voltages just the threshold for the device's powered state, and CPUs made of these can idle along at extremely low voltage doing real work (slower) or they can ramp up the power and work much faster.
The Register has a much better explanation of this technology than the linked article.
The idea is to have devices run at low voltages and power consumption rates that would be akin to a sleep mode in today's chips. And NTV techniques are not just limited to processors used in hand-held devices like smartphones and tablets, but to everything all the way up to exascale supercomputers, says Rattner. The important thing is that NTV techniques allow a chip's performance and power to scale as voltage scales up and down, and to do so across a wide dynamic range.
Also a good summary here:
Marketing spin aside, the "near-threshold voltage" chip is quite an achievement. Intel first revealed in March 2010 that it had a prototype chip running at such low voltages, but Claremont's creators took that technology and baked it into a full IA architecture processor. Based on a Pentium core, Claremont can not only be throttled down to "within a couple of hundred millivolts of the threshold voltage of the transistors," said Intel engineer Sriram Vangal, who demoed the chip during Rattner's turn, but – equally important – it also has a high dynamic range that allows it to be cranked up to deliver ten times the low-power performance by increasing the voltage.
Once again, the Register does a better job of reporting than Techworld.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
We're in a race - computational speed, new materials, new efficiencies versus the rate in which we're polluting the environment. Many things make me optimistic: photovoltaic paints for one - and now processing power so efficient that it can be solar powered. Wow. We may win this race after all. .
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
I'm not sure what transistor geometry Clairmont is manufactured at, but for really small transistors (e.g. 32nm), process variation is a serious problem, making it hard to scale voltage down that low. The results are unpredictable performance from die-to-die and within die and major reliability problems. Static RAMs are hit the hardest, because they use the smallest transistors. "http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti/parichute-camera.pdf" is an example of a paper that explores the consequences of ultra-low voltage SRAMs and tries to solve it with forward error correction.
I was running a processor off of solar years ago. using the VIA C3 processors from 4 years ago. Glad to see Intel catching up to the rest of the industry.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Power is proportional to switching frequency and to the square of the supply voltage. Reducing the supply voltage is the main vehicle to reduce power consumption, but with standard CMOS you run into the problem that transistors leak a little current when they're run at or near the threshold voltage because they don't turn off completely (you need significantly more than the threshold voltage for that.)
So in a totem pole circuit (used in standard CMOS) current leaks straight from Vcc to ground - not good. They must have designed some tricky circuits that avoid this current path although the transistors are still conducting a little.
Of course the real reason behind this is that even standard CMOS designs suffer from leakage -- the smaller the more leakage -- so they can apply these techniques to standard designs as well. That will probably be a necessity at some point beyond 22nm.
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1.2V @ 1GHz is not power efficient at speed. Existing Core designs are running much faster at lower voltages. Based upon what they've demonstrated so far, it's useful for devices that need moderate speed on an occasional basis, but spend the majority of their time at idle.
Now, if they can scale it up to 2-3GHz at around 1V and idle at less than 0.5V at a reduced freq, then it'll be something worth looking at for common applications.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
And here I was thinking that the first solar powered calculators were made in 1978. They have a CPU too, right?
Life is not for the lazy.
I don't about using my computer outside, especially in the summer when it's very hot and in the winter when it's very cold. I might be able to manage spring & fall but not on windy days as my papers would fly about.
http://www.busyweather.com/
They must really be intimidated by rise of ARM. I wonder where this will take us in terms of the evolution of embedded computers.
Reducing the supply voltage is the main vehicle to reduce power consumption, but with standard CMOS you run into the problem that transistors leak a little current when they're run at or near the threshold voltage because they don't turn off completely (you need significantly more than the threshold voltage for that.)
Of course they do; CMOS transistors are analog circuit components. Yes, usually they're driven into a state where their non-linearity makes them behave almost like binary components, but they're very much not that. The closer you drive them to the limit, whether through raising the speed or through lowering the voltage, the more they behave like the analog devices they truly are.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
And some Dell Lattitude even had a separate low power CPU for that task.
Power up the ARM and boot into the in-BIOS Linux for basic web etc.
Power up the Intel and boot into the full installed OS (windows or whatever) for a full environment (but power hungry)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]