In At its annual developer conference in San Francisco, Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner demonstrated a processor powered by a single solar cell. We should not be expecting such a processor to be powering our MacBook or even smartphones any time soon, but the demonstration proves beyond doubt that Intel is thinking creatively about new ways for improving the battery life in our favourite gadgets.
According to Justin Rattner, the experimental processor is about 5 times more efficient as compared to processors that we have today. He also stated that the chip was based on a redesign of a Pentium processor thats more than a decade old, and the underlying technology was so dated that employees needed to scour eBay for a motherboard to plug the chip into.
The Pentium had a vastly simpler design than todays chips, which made the task of redesigning nearly all of the circuits to work right at such low power a more manageable goal for a small team of researchers, Rattner said. While the experimental chip might not become a product, it could lead to the development of processors with near-threshold voltage circuits reducing power consumption by five-fold or more.
Such technology could be useful in power-sucking data centres and handheld devices with limited batter life, such as smartphone sand tablets. It could also be used for processors that dont rely on electricity from the grid, according to Intel, scavenging power from light and motion in the environment around them. One day we could have solar-powered processors powering small sensors that can communicate wirelessly with computers and accomplish complicated tasks on their own.
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