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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."
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.
[. . .]
Low power doesn't mean low performance, with Intel now thinking about microwatts, not milliwatts, said Mike Bell, vice president and general manager of the New Devices group, during an appearance at the keynote.
[. . .]
Future computing devices will be able to understand human behavior through data gathered by embedded sensors and other wearable technology, Bell said. Projects are also underway at Intel labs to bring a more "human element" to mobility, she said.
What a poorly edited article. One never knows which Bell -- Genevieve or Mike -- is speaking.
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.
but wine is not an emulator! http://www.winehq.org/
oh, the other kind of wine
So, is this a compact fuel cell (new tech, catalyzes ethanol into energy), or just a chemical battery (old tech, converting acidic wine and metal contacts into energy)?
And that's the story of how Bender's great-grandpappy was born.
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
I'm glad we're sitting on easily extractable oceans of this stuff!
The demonstration is that Intel has chips running on extremely low power, which honestly is kind of cool.
Using a potato clock to power it was a bit of showmanship that the article submitter turned into the main focus.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
After the sex change, Mike became Genevieve.
Putting dissimilar metals connected by external conductive path in an electrolyte will cause current flow.
Exactly. The wine isn't "powering" the microprocessor. It's the electrolyte. The battery is powered by the electron transfer reaction between the two metals of different oxidation potential.
http://www.how-things-work-science-projects.com/lemon-battery.html#lemon_battery
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Wine is the first step, but why don't we use blood to power microprocessors ?
Everybody can easily extract blood, and a processor named Vampire would be so cool.
Plus we get to name the support site Urine Trouble.
GLADos in a potato
Silence is a state of mime.
Difficult to acquire wine in Germany?
--
I've been telling my wife how I'm being powered by wine and its cousins. Now I have a concrete example.
After all of the wine mysteriously disappeared, Mike became Genevieve.
Fixed.
One for you; one for me.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
France is gonna be pissed when the price of wine skyrockets because of demand from everyone's mobile devices!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Although on second thought, French wine growers are going to be really happy buying new gold plated lear jets.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Will AMD respond with a beer powered processor ?
Seriously, though, it's good to see Intel is serious about, and capable of, truly low power.
Ten years ago, it was a race for the most powerful processor, and Intel won*. Now it's about competing for the lowest power. Kind of ironic.
* For single threaded applications. A web server with a $200 AMD 8-core CPU at 4GHz will beat the pants off $200 of Intel CPU.
Or was it Windows was powered by Intel, NOW YOU ARE telling me that Intel can power a chip by EMULATION INSTEAD OF WINDOWS?
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
What happened to the second law of thermodynamics? As I read this, Windows is run in Wine which can then power the chip to run Windows.....
I think you've just misspelled "Lynn Conway". (Or was it Sophie Wilson?)
Ezekiel 23:20
The interesting part is not that intel made a battery using 2 metals and an acid, its the fact that they powered up a cpu and a display from such a weak battery.
Sure, but can they power them with wine?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
So long as we are talking about a system that requires you to give blood in order to run it's the only choice in fact. Those of us who don't want to give blood and risk infection will continue to use WINE though.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Really? I would have thought showing any kind of CPU powered in any manner at all would have rocked their world.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Let me know when I can run WINE on it.
yes, we can call these electrolytes with dissimilar metals in them a "power cell", and if we make a group, a battery, of them to get either higher potentials or more current , we could call them.......batterized cells? hmnmm, maybe a single word could convey the meaning.....??
It isn't ironic at all. There was never a time when CPU companies were in a race to create processors that sucked up and wasted through heat dissipation as much electrical power as possible. The goal was always to keep the devices as efficient as possible while still providing more processing power. You are mixing concepts because you have failed to use adjectives.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
sure it would work grandly, but the metals would be eaten faster.
Yeah, they just leap frogged ARM! This will be the year of Intel powered phones! ; )
I'll be golden, my spills won't go to waste.
Gently reply
Unfortunately, places that have wine tend not be short on electric power either.
But I get the good intention of the demonstration.
There's Wien, which technically is in Austria. But it's nothing a little Anschluss can't solve.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I heard you like wine, so I'm running Wine on a processor powered by wine.
I guess you never owned a Pentium 4.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Please don't whine about how much wine it takes to run Wine!
FFS don't let anyone invent the wine filled inkjet printer or they'll be dusting off Concorde for their gold plated jets.
Changes the flavor of the wine, I'm sure.
better to just run windows and not wine+other os
I guess the world's energy problems can also be solved with a big WHOOSH next to a wind turbine.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The demonstration is that Intel has chips running on extremely low power, which honestly is kind of cool.
Actually, this is because Intel developers obviously drink a LOT and probably accidentally knocked an open bottle of wine onto something in the lab. The "demonstration" is the result of the official incident write-up as an "experiment"... :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
They aren't hyping them for desktops; just smart phones and tablets. Since there were no smart-phones and tablets back then you are comparing two different markets completely. You might say laptops are the exception, but they aren't. There have always been lower power options for CPUs so long as there has been laptops.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
It was never true that a RISC component could "go half as fast" as a CISC component, nor was it true that RISC architectures that could compete with CISC drew 1% as much power. You are comparing apples and oranges by calling the finish line 1 instruction. In other words, clocking a RISC chip at the same speed as a CISC chip doesn't make them equally fast. With RISC you need to execute a significantly greater number of instructions to execute the same source code. You also don't know what the word efficient means in the context of my statement. That being said, I've learned a long time ago that trying to educate someone with a high 7 digit SlashID is a losing battle, so enjoy your delusion.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Targeted ads on your wine glasses in the better restaurants? You know it's going to happen.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The price of French wine is already skyrocketing because the Chinese are buying up all the wine. There are lots and lots of Chinese, and lots and lots of them are getting wealthy enough to afford wine...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Sophie Wilson played a barmaid in a BBC drama about the rivalry between Acorn and Amstrad. Not sure if she actually served himself a drink.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Did you want some Canapes and Crackers with your whine?
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
I thought this discussion ended decades ago.
Nowadays CPUs use concepts from both families, and other, new concepts which aren't publicly being discussed because most of the ipad generation knows nothing about chip design anymore.
We learned it's a good idea to design chips to accomodate the user (in this case a C compiler) rather than the other way around.
Now that we've reached the end of that free lunch, we need to do vector instructions, parallel chips and other methods that suck because they require constant change in legacy code...
You have been around long enough to know this discussion will never end. There will always be new fish. Note that I am not arguing for one approach over the other, but rather trying to get the new fish to realize that he is woefully misinformed. A hybrid approach is almost always the best answer in any design approach, not just in a CISC vs RISC scenario. Any time people treat as mutually exclusive that which is not by nature mutually exclusive that removes options, and so long as intelligent choice is being made with regard to those options, it is always bad to remove options from consideration during the design process.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
France produce more wine that it consumes, therefore a soaring price will benefit the local economy.
When I started with Motorola in the mid/late '80s, the RISC processor called the 88100 was in the process of being released. It was a physical monstrosity compared to the MC68030 and prior, and consumed an outrageous 25 watts. I made a comment to one of the architects that they should have put it in a circular package instead of square one, and he went off about how incredibly wasteful that would be, how hard it would be to escape the signals, etc... before finally asking me why would I even consider that. I said, at 25 watts, it would make a much better coffee warmer than the 68030 (the 68030 was on the order of a 2.5W CPU, typically passively cooled).
I learned that day that some architects have very little sense of humor.
Later, talking to some Intel reps about the BTX specification that was in the planning stages, I suggested that they put a metal plate standing up from the motherboard in their spec, between the graphics card slot and the CPU. When asked why, I suggested it was so that in a tower case, a person could place their cookies or brownies on the plate to cook, given that their CPU was 25 watts over the 100W bulb used in an Easy Bake Oven (TM somebody, I forget) and with all the fans, the convection cooking capability could be wonderful. This discussion was going on as I was trying to convince them to let us (my employer at the time, Dell) produce a demonstration desktop computer around Yonah (mobile CPU, prior to Intel giving up on the P4 architecture, which was competitive with the P4 on integer benchmarks, but had relatively poor fp performance). Funny thing about that, they seemed more offended about my suggestion that a 'mobile' cpu architecture could be competitive in a desktop environment than their current desktop CPU offering could make every office smell like chocolate chip cookies every day. My, how the worm turned.
That is Wien (pronounced 'ween'), whereas wine in German is wein (rhymes w/ Rhine)
It's called context, and in context there is never any doubt about which Bell we are talking about. Failing to understand would be entirely blamed on your ability (or rather lack of such) to read.
Not sure if she actually served himself a drink.
Haha. :) Yeah, I have to see that piece, it's the stuff of legends. Poor Sir Clive. :-)
Ezekiel 23:20
I'm waiting to see the trademark complaint from AMD when someone tries to use Thunderbird wine on an Intel processor, proving that AMD continues to protect its place as the leader in budget processors.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
thousands years after the egyptians but we got there!
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
First there's a food shortage as the US converts corn to ethanol, and the price of corn and corn meal go through the roof. Now we're going to have to run our systems on wine, and the price of even cheap crap will go through the roof....
mark "I'll have the inexpensive 12 yr single malt, please, I can't afford the MD 2020"
Or an Athlon XP 2000+. Honestly, I used to keep my very small bedroom warm with that CPU and a 15" CRT through the entire winter back in the day. No kidding.
Nowadays' LCDs and CPUs suck, I need a heater to stay warm in winter!