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

Genevieve Bell? Mike Bell?

[dtmos]

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.

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 just in

[maestroX]

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

Incorrect, eloctrolysis uses direct current (DC) by definition :)

wine?

[Anonymous Coward]

but wine is not an emulator! http://www.winehq.org/

oh, the other kind of wine

Re:wine?

[Anonymous Coward]

WINE = Wine Is Not Electricity

Cheer up, meatbags

[carlhirsch]

And that's the story of how Bender's great-grandpappy was born.

Re:this is exactly what we needed!

[kamapuaa]

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.

What next ?

[eulernet]

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.

Re:Could it also run on urine?

[Smallpond]

Plus we get to name the support site Urine Trouble.

next up

[wbr1]

GLADos in a potato

In vino verilog.

[Anonymous Coward]

--

Re:Genevieve Bell? Mike Bell?

[Anonymous Coward]

After all of the wine mysteriously disappeared, Mike became Genevieve.

Fixed.

Re:AMD responds with beer CPU. Seriously, though .

[Hognoxious]

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.

I guess you never owned a Pentium 4.

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.