Intel Experimental Processor Runs On Solar Power 104
An anonymous reader writes "For the IDF keynote, Intel showed an experimental processor that is solar powered (incandescent light shining on a solar panel). The whole computer itself still runs on regular power; only the processor itself is solar. From the article: 'The concept processor, code-named Claremont, can run light workloads on solar power by dropping energy consumption to under 10 milliwatts, said Justin Rattner, chief technology officer at Intel, during a keynote address at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. That is low enough to keep a chip running on a solar cell the size of a stamp.'"
I proposed this at lunch at IBM Research ~ 1999 (Score:2, Interesting)
I suggested IBM could make chips that get power from a solar cell integrated with them, and that communicate with each other via either light or radio (so, no need for a backplane or wire harnesses, and potentially the light could even be directable to build ad-hoc networks across an open central space if the chips were on the inside of a sphere). No one took it very seriously. In college, around 1984, I suggested a desktop computer that was the desktop and was a monolithic several centimeter thick optical computer (the reaction was mostly just bemusement). A couple years earlier I'd suggested in a physics term paper how optical computer links between chips would probably be needed to do AI (the professor could not understand what that had to do with physics).
Guess it's just hard being ahead of your time. :-) The wages of reading too much sci-fi I guess -- where I first read about optical computing and communications ideas. Of course Hal 9000 had an optical computing core, and IBM helped with some ideas there, so maybe ideas can come full circle?
Glad to see people are finally making them, even if not IBM. Although maybe not so glad, as they could soon become "smart dust" and there goes the rest of our privacy (see Vernor Vinge who uses the smart dust theme in at least two stories).