News Intel shows off low-power chips at ISSCC

Intel has demonstrated a Near Voltage Threshold (NVT) processor at the ISSCC event, along with a new floating-point design.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/02/20/intel-shows-off-low-power-chips/1

 

Intel demoing a low-power CPU? I'm having de ja vu...

Also... original Pentium architecture... wonder if it has the division bug?

This is great, depending on what core voltage gets what frequency. If it ticks over at 3MHz at 0.28V, fine... but if it needs 1.2V to hit any speed faster than a a few hundred MHz, it's not so great.

That said, I'm sure I've seen people undervolting their first gen Core i7s to incredibly low levels... and doesn't that chip run at 1600MHz @ 0.9-something volts when idle? And they're 45nm chips!

 

I thought I had seen something about a solar power chip, from Intel in the past and was about to try and find it to link to it but you got there before me.

Would be nice to see 5ghz+ using less than 1v though.

 

now imagine millions of these all working together 0.o?!

 

This looks to be a bit jumbled; the chip doesn't 'draw' 280mV (millivolts), it runs from a supply of 280mV. The term draw is usually used for Power consumption figures.

Regarding Power consumption figures, they are very impressive looking; having checked the Intel press release, Intel claim that when idling at it minimum supply voltage, the chip uses a mind - bogglingly low 2mW of power! For something that could probably run a desktop operating system, I have to admit it looks impressive.

Edit: I appear to have got the power consumption info from an earlier release from Intel, relating back to the part in the previous bit-tech article pointed to by Paradigm Shifter.