Word on the street is that Intel wants to extend the technology to hardware such as graphics processors, memory and floating point units. Last year we saw a low-power processor, charged only by the light, running Windows and Linux PCs.
Intel is expected to share further details about the processor, which is code-named Claremont, at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco next week.
The CPU is a near-threshold voltage (NTV) CPU for its ability to keep operating at extremely low voltage levels. The CPU's can go down to 280 millivolts when running at 3MHz, and up to 1.2 volts when running at around 1Ghz when more performance is needed. The CPU can remain at near-threshold voltage levels when not operational, which could keep laptops operational without killing battery life. That is much better than putting a PC into sleep or hibernation mode to save battery.