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Intel's Wine-Powered Microprocessor

Posted by samzenpus on from the it-does-go-well-with-the-fish dept.

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."

13 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. this just in by iggymanz · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:this just in by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:this just in by Penguinisto · · Score: 4, Informative

      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...

      --
      Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
    3. Re:this just in by maestroX · · Score: 4, Funny

      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 :)

  2. wine? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    oh, the other kind of wine

    1. Re:wine? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      WINE = Wine Is Not Electricity

  3. Cheer up, meatbags by carlhirsch · · Score: 5, Funny

    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"
  4. Re:this is exactly what we needed! by kamapuaa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  5. What next ? by eulernet · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  6. next up by wbr1 · · Score: 4, Funny

    GLADos in a potato

    --
    Silence is a state of mime.
  7. In vino verilog. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    --

  8. Re:Genevieve Bell? Mike Bell? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    Fixed.

  9. Re:AMD responds with beer CPU. Seriously, though . by Hognoxious · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."