Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin demonstrated a processor powered by a single solar cell at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco Thursday. The processor probably won’t be coming to a MacBook anytime soon. The demonstration does provide proof, however, that Intel is thinking creatively about ways to improve your laptop’s battery life.
The so-called near-threshold voltage (NTV) processor uses circuits that operate very close to the ‘turn-on’ voltage of the transistors. A typical transistor operates at 1 volt, while the NTV circuits run on about half that. That’s not easy: at such low voltages the difference between a ’1′ and a ’0′ is very slight.
The benefit: Rattner could demonstrate a processor doing work while powered by a solar cell the size of a postage stamp . While Intel says the research chip itself — based on the super-scalar Pentium core Intel’s scientists have been playing with for some time — won’t become a product, the research could result in processors with near-threshold voltage circuits reducing power consumption by five-fold or more.
Such technology could be useful in power-sucking data centers and handheld devices with limited batter life, such as smartphone sand tablets, obviously. It could also be used for processors that don’t rely on electricity from the grid, according to Intel, scavenging power from light and motion in the environment around them.