Researchers Design Microchip Ten Times More Efficient 113
WirePosted writes to mention that a new highly efficient microchip has been announced by researchers from MIT and Texas Instruments. The new chip touts up to 10 times more energy efficiency than current generation chips. "One key to the new chip design, Chandrakasan says, was to build a high-efficiency DC-to-DC converter--which reduces the voltage to the lower level--right on the same chip, reducing the number of separate components. The redesigned memory and logic, along with the DC-to-DC converter, are all integrated to realize a complete system-on-a-chip solution."
Will we get these soon? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Will we get these soon? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Will we get these soon? (Score:4, Funny)
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Actually, according to Wikipedia the number has tripled in the last six months.
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Re:Will we get these soon? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Like for instance. If I touch the girls here at work (...I'll likely lose my job *rim shot* [you know someone was thinking it]), they are usually "colder" than my body temp. Would this mean that the "warmer feeling" bodies would power these easier? Would those with "cold bodies" not have enough heat to power their PDA at all? Does it matter?
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If your pants are on the other hand, you're doing it wrong.
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Pacemakers? (Score:2)
Haven't they got those things running off ATP [wikipedia.org] yet?
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Feet vs armpits. Should be a vast difference.
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Do you have a better analogy for relative measure of processing power or are you just being pedantic?
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Intel core 2 duo => approx 35 watts = 0.47 HP,+/-
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(preview is my friend, preview is my friend, preview is my friend . . . )
Power is power, electrical or horse.
Intel core 2 duo => approx 35 watts = 0.047 HP,+/-
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Re:Will we get these soon? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Will we get these soon? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Will we get these soon? (Score:4, Interesting)
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And the cost to implement will also include patent licensing for chip manufacturers, not just the production costs as it may for current designs.
Actual Product Available NOW! (Score:1)
Although the study quoted by the OP got a lot of media attention because of MIT involvement, what is more interesting is this actual product that has been released last month: "One AAA battery! The boss must be kidding..." [embedded-computing.com]
This company (Silicon Labs) has managed to put a DC-DC converter in a microcontroller and have
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Dup? (Score:5, Informative)
I thought this sounded familiar. [slashdot.org]
Any chance of commercial success? (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I would love to see a chip that requires very low power make it into the mainstream market. I think it would great to have something like that for the miniITX form factor or something of that nature that hobbyists could tinker with and find fun applications for. The Transmeta, unfortunately, never realized that as far as I ever saw.
Re:Any chance of commercial success? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, from the article: "So far the new chip is at the proof of concept stage. Commercial applications could become available "in five years, maybe even sooner, in a number of exciting areas," Chandrakasan says
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Yeah, but that was transmeta's fault (Score:2)
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Re:Any chance of commercial success? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, I do recall that the Transmeta chips were a fair amount slower than the Intel / AMD chips that were out at the same time, though in some regards one could say they made up for it with far better battery life in laptops.
I can't speak for everyone, but I wasn't planning to run duke nukem forever on a low-power system... But I can think of plenty of typical household applications that would be well suited to a cpu that consumes less power.
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Re:Any chance of commercial success? (Score:5, Insightful)
That depends on youe definition of 'the mainstream market'. This technology may never appear in desktop/laptop PCs, but become popular in handheld devices where power consumption is a major issue. There is a limited amount of power saving economically feasible in PCs as long as the displays and other peripherals continue to be major power hogs.
Another interesting market might be in server farms. But I wouldn't count on this driving the market. CPU architectures specific to servers haven't sold well, so this isn't an economically viable niche.
Microcontrollers are a large enough market segment to justify the R&D. I forget where I read this, but if you take the total percentage of the uP and uCs installed in PCs and round it to the nearest whole percent, that number is zero.
Re:Any chance of commercial success? (Score:5, Informative)
Like anything, the commercial viability of this doesn't just depend on how much better it is than what's already out there, but on how long it'll take their competitors to catch up.
Transmetta didn't do so well, but the real winner of Transmetta's actions was the consumer. Transmetta drove Intel and AMD to improve efficiency much more rapidly than they had been. Let's hope this new technology makes it into production and does the same.
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Thet had low power consumption yes, but the review also said that their performances weren't that good..
So was their performance/power good enough or not?
I don't know: does someone have figures?
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Cutting to the chase (Score:5, Informative)
from TFA:
So far the new chip is at the proof of concept stage. Commercial applications could become available "in five years, maybe even sooner, in a number of exciting areas," Chandrakasan says.
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Sure, in five years the available chips will be a lot better than the stuff that's here now. But when this technique has matured enough, it could be applied to the chips in 5 years and we'll still get a 10 fold improvement! (Or something like that
This seems to be a complete other kind of advancement than regular chip evolution we've seen so far.
Re:Cutting to the chase (Score:5, Informative)
There's not enough in TFA to say for sure, but I'd guess rather the opposite. The main thing they mention is a lower power supply voltage. Power supply voltages have been dropping steadily for a long time. Once upon a time, the most common logic family was the 7400 series, which all used 5 volt power supplies. Somewhat later 3.3 volt CMOS logic was introduced. Most CPUs, memory, etc., now use somewhere between 1 and 2 volts.
For the most part, you get a trade-off between voltage and speed -- with a higher voltage, you can charge up a more reactive load more quickly, giving faster rise and fall times. That translates directly to higher bus speed.
At the same time, the power you use is the product of the voltage and the current, so as you raise the voltage you raise the power usage. Worse, the current you drive through a given impedance also rises linearly with the voltage -- so the power usage is proportional to the square of the voltage.
That (probably) explains to a large degree how/why they've reduced the power usage by a ration of 10:1 by reducing the voltage by a ratio of something like 4:1 (in theory, a 10:1 power reduction should imply a voltage reduction by the square root of 10, roughly 3.16).
In any case, however, nothing in the article really suggests that they've departed a great deal from the path everybody's been following for quite a while. Of course, they may have done something truly radical here -- but based on what they've said, that isn't necessarily the case.
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That's not really new by itself. Just for an obvious example, most Flash ROM chips need a relatively high voltage for writing. Early Flash ROM chips used dual power supplies to support that, but most current Flash ROM chips use a single external power supply and an on-board DC-DC convert
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I've been out of it for awhile, but yeah, that's what I was thinking. Unless they've really pulled out some whizbangery, they've just made a really slow processor that doesn't take much power. Meh. How much different is this, really from making a CMOS processor with a low-voltage ext
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And then I read that quote. Yep... just another aspirational "news" story. Tag under: "flyingcars", "dukenukemforever" and "robotbulter".
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This company (Silicon Labs) has managed to put a DC-DC converter in a microcontroller and have managed to do this on an actual product that you can buy now (not just a research project!). They claim to be able to run for years (even >15 years) on typical low-power applications such a
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Re:I wonder where it will be built at? (Score:5, Insightful)
The researchers are: "graduate students Yogesh Ramadass, Naveen Verma, and Joyce Kwong, along with Professor Anantha Chandrakasan". While they may very well all be U.S. citizens, it makes me want to ask for a precise definition of "American know-how".
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Re:I wonder where it will be built at? (Score:5, Funny)
Even when I was in engineering school, the majority of graduate students were foreign. I forget where, but I once read a quote that went something like this: "American universities are the best in the world. In fact, they are so good that American high school graduates can't compete in them".
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Re:I wonder where it will be built at? (Score:5, Funny)
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Lacking details (Score:1)
This is simply an experiment in voltage scaling! (Score:5, Informative)
Since power usage is (roughly!) proportional to voltage squared, getting the chip to run at less than one third the usual voltage will indeed give an order of magnitude reduction in power usage.
From the report:
Terje
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Perhaps memory chips may hold data at a much lower voltage and only need a boost during a write operation.
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Anyway, I didn't find an explanation in the article. So what is a theoretical 100% efficiency with respect to logic circuits? Every electron turned into a bit of information? Every pair of electrons? It seems
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P proportional to V^3 for chips, not V^2 (Score:1)
Re:This is simply an experiment in voltage scaling (Score:1)
Body Heat powered....Brain Implants.... (Score:1)
If they are in the head, the head is pretty warm, in fact it is one of the warmest areas of the body.
I think that powering protectics, at least the control systems via body heat would simplfy the power requirements for prosthetics.
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Tap the skin behind your ear, turns the unit on for talking. a thin hollow cable to the front of the ear for listening, and a jawbone transducer for talking.
It would look a lot better than existing headsets(since everything is subdermal/cranial) but you would look even crazier talking in public without anything on your head. Also it couldn't be stolen or t
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wouldn't you want the voltage to be HIGHER? (Score:2)
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Every transistor leaks current to some extent. And as those transistors get smaller, that amount of leakage likes to get bigger, becau
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Probably not. (Score:2)
Interesting but what about variability? (Score:5, Interesting)
See You In 5 Years (Score:2)
Because 5 years from now, I'd really love to quickly and easily see just how accurate or inaccurate that industry standard five-year prediction really is.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Power more epensive (Score:1)