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."

Comments

Actually Solar is not the quest here folks...

[icebike]

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.

It's a Race

[GLMDesigns]

So many people are worried about how technological advances are ruining the environment. What many often forget is that technology is also the answer (unless you want to go back to a hunter-gather lifestyle and I hear that the drum/smoke-signal bandwidth really sucks, it's takes forever to download the latest movie.)

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. .

Re:It's a Race

[ZankerH]

How many FLOPS does that get you at peak performance?

Saying the human brain is "more powerful" makes no sense by itself. It's better at certain tasks (like pattern recognition, jumping to conclusions and holding contradictory beliefs) because it's hard-wired to do them. When it has to use general-purpose computing (like when you try to do floating-point math), you'll find most computers a great deal faster and more efficient.

Re:Intel late to the game for low power consumptio

[DigiShaman]

And here I was thinking that the first solar powered calculators were made in 1978. They have a CPU too, right?