Power Bits: June 24
By Ed Sperling
Rugged Low Power
A new notebook computer has hit the market, featuring low power and high resistance—as in resistance to shelling, armed assaults, and the kinds of things you never want to encounter. It’s made by General Dynamics, the military contractor.
The device uses a 5.6-inch screen, an Intel Ultra Low Voltage Core Solo processor, includes a GPS, and it weighs just 2.4 pounds. That’s less than most notebooks—the MacBook Air, in comparison, is 2.3 pounds for the 11-inch model. But unlike the Air, this one you can probably throw at your enemy in hand-to-hand combat and it will still work—at least for six hours, which is how long the battery lasts. The base model starts at $4,900.
One particularly nice feature is that you can read the screen in bright sunlight, which you don’t find in most portable devices. It even has WiFi and Bluetooth.
Superpower
The bragging rights for the processors that run the world’s fastest computers has always been about performance and scalability. This is one of the reasons Nvidia has done so well in this arena—graphics processors lend themselves nicely to sharing tasks for relatively low cost.
Intel’s newest approach brings in another element, though—power. The company says that the Chinese Tianhe-1A supercomputer would require 1.6GW of electricity to achieve the same amount of power as the new Many Integrated Core architecture using Tri-Gate 3D transistors. That’s about enough electricity to power 2 million homes, according to Intel’s calculations.
Exactly how much the power can be reduced in similar computers using 3D structures is unknown, but we’re about to find out when Intel starts turning out these chips over the next few months. There may not be any additional supercomputers, but you probably won’t notice them as much—providing you can screen out all the marketing noise that’s about to follow.
Tags: General Dynamics, Intel, low power