Intel's Wine-Powered Microprocessor

angry tapir writes "In a new twist on strange brew, an Intel engineer has showed off a project using wine to power a microprocessor. The engineer poured red wine into a glass containing circuitry on two metal boards during a keynote by Genevieve Bell, Intel fellow, at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. Once the red wine hit the metal, the microprocessor on a circuit board powered up. The low-power microprocessor then ran a graphics program on a computer with an e-ink display."

Comments

this just in

[iggymanz]

Putting dissimilar metals connected by external conductive path in an electrolyte will cause current flow.

I've even seen some outdoors website forum people going gaga over the concept that nailing a couple dissimilar metallic spikes into a tree can "make electricity". Please, just carry a spare battery for your cell phone, breaching the bark of a tree with reactive metals is bad.

Re:this just in

[Anonymous Coward]

I got a good chuckle from your comment but maybe the point of the demo is how little juice is required to power the computer.

Re:this just in

[Penguinisto]

AC is of course correct - the point was that they made the equivalent of a potato clock, but on a computer.

IIRC, they're not even the first to make a simple electrolysis battery drive a computer. Which means we have at least one outside boundary for the typical Slashdot editor's memory-span...

Re: this is exactly what we needed!

[petermgreen]

I don't know if you are being serious but AIUI at least one of the electrodes is a consumable. So to maintain crude batteries you need not just a supply of electrolyte (the wine) but also a supply of refined metals.