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.'"
Claremont? (Score:2)
I think that's French, for "Koh-e-Noor".
Imagine... (Score:3, Funny)
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You want to sell the sun?
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"Hi, this is Dave calling from UTC+1. Can you do a quick google search for me?" "Sorry, can't do. My proto-sentient house called it a day and went into hibernation a few minutes ago..."
But: innermost shell of a Matrioshka Brain?
10mW chip running off 60W bulb (Score:1, Troll)
Re:10mW chip running off 60W bulb (Score:4, Funny)
It's not for you.
It's for people who actually see the sun sometimes.
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I believe those are called daywalkers.
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60W incandescent bulb =
1.26watts light
58.74 watts heat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb#Efficiency_and_environmental_impact [wikipedia.org]
Look a how much of the light is shining off the panel and the efficiency of the light->cpu is even better
And is the cpu using all the power available from the panel?
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Dear Internet Poster,
I am sorry to hear that your sarcasm meter is broken. I would like to take this opportunity to explain that my comment was made purely as a joke, and that I am actually a strong supporter of alternative energy and efficiency. I understand the technical feats involved in this project, but I just thought it was hilarious that their "super energy efficient processor" was being powered by an incandescent light bulb. (Not that making fun of climate denialists isn't fun too, but it's not
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Except you don't always have lights. And in plenty of places you don't even have basic candle light. This is a pretty show piece, nothing more.
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And as for your objection, nobody said the thing couldn't have a rechargeable battery. If the thing is going to be in darkness forever you use something else for that very contrived edge case.
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The first calculators I got to use plugged into wall sockets for power.
Hah! the first calculator I got to use was full of people!
joke aside you are right that is seems just logical for processor developers to find more and more energy efficient designs but I never expected the main manufacturers (Intel|AMD) to come up with it. Not with the never ending Flop fever© of the computer industry.
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As long as the rest of the computer needs conventional power, a solar-powered CPU doesn't give you any advantage. What I think they actually wanted to show is "see, our processor needs that little energy that you can even put it on a solar cell!" Given that processors are usually hidden somewhere in a case, having a solar cell attached to it wouldn't usually do much good anyway. Of course if all components of the computer can be made to consume that
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I doubt people would be content with 300x200 monochrome screen in their laptop.
The biggest power drains in laptops are the screens and hard disks. The latter is fixed with SSDs, the former not so much. Though I think it would be actually possible to create a sub 50mW computer if you used e-Ink display, SSD storage and CPU from the article.
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Actually yes. Considering that the slide rule could still do more, and more efficiently. Until the rest of the components catch up, a CPU running in that state is nothing more than a pretty show piece.
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Think at the bright side!
this will bring nerds to the outsides! Except for those who will do the obvious and use 400 lightbulbs to drive their new light powered® computer and drive their electricity costs up 70000%.
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Relax, or die, idiot. The overwhelming majority of human beings frown on your behaviour. You are fucking American bully scum and your treatment of the rest of the world (including me, today) will not carry on forever.
Noone was pretending to be a mod. Noone was even sure (Even the editors can never to be sure!) whether they were posted by the same person, but it damn well looks like it, what with the first cue-ing the second so well!
In fact, your voilent reaction seems to imply that you DID do it, and didn't
Information Void? (Score:1)
Urgh - a quick google unearths nothing more than copy-pastes of this article
Anyone got something more interesting on the actual tech?
Re:Information Void? (Score:4, Informative)
AnandTech has some more details [anandtech.com].
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Urgh - a quick google unearths nothing more than copy-pastes of this article
Anyone got something more interesting on the actual tech?
Well, a quick Google for "claremont site:intel.com" found this page [intel.com], but I suspect somebody else has already discovered it and posted it here, or the site's running from that processor and somebody turned the light off, as it's responding rather slowly. From the Google summary, it's a "Near Threshold Voltage Processor".
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"Incandescent"?! (Score:2)
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Damnit where are my mod points for this?!?!?!
Light workloads (Score:5, Funny)
That makes sense. Now what if you want to run dark workloads?
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yl3UMO-TkE [youtube.com]
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The concept processor, code-named Claremont, can run light workloads on solar power...
That makes sense. Now what if you want to run dark workloads?
The concept processor, code-named Claremont, can run light workloads on solar power...
That makes sense. Now what if you want to run dark workloads?
I find your fear of the dark workload disturbing.
--
I'm sorry, we can't print your check; the light bulb burned out.
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How light? Would it be powerful enough to run a pocket calculator?
I bags the patent on that idea.
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those grapes can be a little sour when they're unripe.
Now those case windows have a purpose (Score:1)
What does it matter? (Score:1)
Re:What does it matter? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Impressive... (Score:2)
Apparently, Intel has been working on bringing down the Vcore as sharply as their process capabilities allow. Lower core voltage, substantially lower power consumption, all else being equal(as people overvolting their CPUs tend to find out quickly...) It remains to be seen if Intel will be able to do this cheaply enough to actu
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This isn't really something Intel can do optionally though. With the rate power consumption of CPU cores has been increasing, they need to do something about it pretty much now since it's not going to be possible to air-heatsink that much heat if it keeps going up.
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With the rate power consumption of CPU cores has been increasing
You are a few years behind the curve. Since the pentium D CPU TDP (roughly power consumption under the highest normal load) has stayed pretty much flat while core counts and performance of individual cores have gone up (despite the drop in clockspeeds)
The power consumption per core has been going down in recent times. The pentium D 965 extreme has two cores, a clockspeed of 3.73 GHz and a TDP of 130W. The i7-990x has six cores.a nominal clockspeed of 3.47 GHz (plus turbo boost) and a TDP of 130W.
Comparing t
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The point still stands though - super-low power consumption has to be an active area of research for them since we've been at about the maximum manageable power consumption by a CPU for a while now. Increases in transistor counts need to accompany decreases in power consumption per transistor.
yes, yes it does! (Score:1)
The chip is an experimental Pentium CPU and ran on a PC with the Linux operating system.
Great (Score:2)
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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
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"Your future will be ready in 20-50 years, same as last time, and before that, and before that."
True:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson [wikiquote.org]
"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed."
"Maybe if you spent less time reading SF, and more reading TFS, you'd realize that this has no connection to any of your ideas about optical communication and/or computation. "
Maybe. But, sadly, I don't read much sci-fi these days (no time). About the only sci-fi thing I read in the past few month
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"No, I think you'll find what's "hard" is actually making things that other people talk or dream about :-)"
True, but that is also hard to do when most of the social resources to do that are diverted into "me, too" redundant competition, paperwork related to that like patents, or, alternatively, military arms races.
I would have been happy to work on the details of all sorts of neat socially-useful devices. (I've ended up do mostly software because it was cheaper to do that as a small independent compared to
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That's fantastic and all, but you're completely missing the point. The fact that it was powered by a PV cell is irrelevant. What they are showing off is a Pentium core and DDR3 memory idling at 10mW.
Try reading TFA with your English parser active. The memory experienced a sevenfold power reduction and the CPU "can run light workloads" at "less than" 10mW (which in my book has me counting nines.) DRAM still has to be refreshed and SRAM still sucks power. (Where's my MRAM?) Also, a classic weakness in Intel solutions has been the power consumption of the chipset. When the Athlon 64 came out and eliminated the north bridge the desktop offering was lower-power than Intel's powerful mobile chip of the time
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AC wrote: "To be blunt: no one took your ideas seriously because they were stupid ideas that showed you had no idea what you were talking about, and they were all too nice to laugh in your face. Sorry. You're now patting yourself on the back for something completely unrelated, so it seems someone really needed to do the laugh-in-your-face part before you keep going on about it again."
Thank you, AC. :-) It's good to stay humble, true.
For reference:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010405020550/http://www.cascadep [archive.org]
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Well, I don't see much value in stating great goals without any concrete ideas of how to achieve them, unless you are really the first person to actually think of the goal itself. Saying it would be great to have a processor consuming only a few mW is not very helpful. Yes of course it would be great, people have been working on reducing power consumption for a long time.
Actually having an idea how to reach that goal - now that's something interesting to hear about.
Also you seem to have misunderstood th
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True overall, including on my misperception on the TFA, but see my other comments in this thread.
Also, on: "Well, I don't see much value in stating great goals without any concrete ideas of how to achieve them".
That kind of ignores that notion of "fundamental research" which you would think a big research organization ideally would do more of. Related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_research [wikipedia.org]
Also, it ignores the notion of research as a social endeavor.
Why should people, especially in a resea
RCA's CDP-1802 did that 30+ years ago (Score:2)
Glad to see Intel finally catching up.
Sea-Change (Score:1)
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What is the major mental deficit that leads to a bunch of people hearing that Intel in a demonstration indoors in a conference hall used a 60W light bulb to power there demo low powered CPU, concluding that obviously Intel are saying that under normal circumstances you would use a 60W light bulb to power said processor.
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Well... if you can get a PC to run off of 10mw I have a power source that would be cool, and it's not Solar...
4 surplus pacemakers from the 70's and 80's those use a nuclear battery How would you like a 20 year battery for your laptop?
That's what this is all about (Score:2)
The solar aspect is just a visual demonstration to get across how low-power the chip is.
They might have powered it with a potato if they could get it low-power enough.
10mW, you can get that from... (Score:2)
While the whole solar-powered thing is kind of a gimmick, the fact that they have an (x86-compatible?), 'real' CPU (not microcontrollers) operating on 10mW is pretty impressive. This is a level where powering from ambient motion and a user's body heat is also feasible.
Would the last person to leave... (Score:3)
Would the last person to leave, please DON'T turn off the lights.
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Ring Ring...
Pick any computer you like from Dell or other sources and I can make it run on solar with no effort. just add enough solar panels and inverter to meet it's watt need.
Running on solar is the 2011 equivalent of 1999's innovation called "on the internet"
Look I'm a genius! I'm doing accounting..... ON THE INTERNET!!!!
Go all the way! (Score:2)
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CPUs are made of monocrystalline Si, solar panels are made by polychristalline Si. Dotation (sp?) is most certainly different as well.
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Seems like research supports this: ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/16/5896011/05773485.pdf?arnumber=5773485
Oh good god...... (Score:2)
Why is everyone doing this "IT RUNS ON SOLAR!!!! crap?
The Pentium III runs on solar! Give me $600.00 and I'll go to harbor freight and buy 3 of their solar panels kits and run an entire computer from 1999 on solar! Look it's the first solar Desktop computer!
This is nothing special. I have a VIA C5 processor in a motherboard that draws less than 15 watts when going full boat from 5 years ago that will run on solar. That makes VIA far better at this because they are 5 years ahead of intel!
everything in m
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