Hardware Intel's Solar-Powered CPU

IMO, its more to do with stuff like ultra portable netbooks/laptops and possibly the server/rackmount industry rather then commerical desktop PCs

Imagine if these solar powered CPUs were the new Intel Atom Processor??? No one would be able to compete with them on battery life.

 

The point of this demo was not to demonstrate solar powered PC's!!!

ONLY the CPU is solar powered. The rest of the system is powered conventionally with a power supply.

This is showing that Near Threshold Voltage techniques can be used to reduce power consumption/heat thus allowing higher core counts (32+) as was mentioned. In practice the power would come from the wall just like a normalp PC...

 

I think that many of you seem to be missing a very important point, the potential for ultra cheap computing, consider cumputing with near persintent/ permanent ram. If we could lower the power requirement of the system it might be possible to just use the equivalent of a 9v batterry to power a laptop, HTPC or even a home server.
I'm seing some potential and it could get very exciting. Mind you, without something like(very serious and imaginative) speed step tech, i don't see this making its way into everyday desktop let alone a gaming rig.

 

Yeah, but can it play crisis?

 

The fact that this thing is based on a S7 Pentium suggests to me that what's happened here is one of the Intel engineers decided to see how low he could get the power of a machine as a pet project, and when he was done someone higher up the food chain realised the potential.

Otherwise why not use Atom as a starting point?

I would love to see this CPU with, say, 32MB ram and 64MB NVRam integrated into it along with the NB & SB, and made as cheaply as possible, for inclusion in a linux based *SUPER* cheap PC for African/Asian schools.