New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades • Hacker News Board

Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades

#21

Post by realityking » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 10:02 AM UTC

antimagic wrote: post #15

fijal wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

british BTU or american BTU? please use SI standard measures for those who don't happen to live in America :-)

I'm trying to figure out if you're joking or not. BTU = British Thermal Unit and is pretty much the standard measure used around the world when talking about energy use associated with heating. It's the amount of energy needed to heat one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit, regardless of where you find yourself in the world...

While only one data point, in Germany BTU is very uncommon. Energy used for heating is expressed as kWh, same as with electricity.

Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades

#22

Post by minikites » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 10:05 AM UTC

I see that it's 32-bit, is the year 2038 problem a significant concern for a device like this?

Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades

#23

Post by minthd » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 10:06 AM UTC

sschueller wrote: post #14

Would it be feasible to power this cheap of electromagnetic radiation? http://www.technologyreview.com/news/413744/wireless-power-h...

This guys sell components that enable battery free operation(according to their claims) using rf energy:

http://www.powercastco.com/

BTW, rf energy is generally among the lowest energy harvesting sources, and in many cases environmental light, vibration(for example on a machine) ,and heat are much stronger energy harvesting sources, and most likely available at low cost.

Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades

#24

Post by minthd » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 10:10 AM UTC

pietrofmaggi wrote: post #8

Zardoz84 wrote: post #3

I think that this just killed the one of the triumph card of PIC micro-controllers. Seriously, Microchip uC have now any interesting thing apart of a lot of embed I/O hardware inside ? ARM based uCs now are cheap, low powered and have far better IDEs and compilers...

The strongest selling point for PIC is always the quality of the I/O hardware and the attention to the low-volume market. The CPU core is just something that you need to deal with. ATMEL is always great presenting fabulous MCU than sometimes takes forever to reach the low-volume markets. Lead time is always an important parameter to consider when choosing a new MCU for a low-volume project :-) I used to start new pro…

>> ATMEL is always great presenting fabulous MCU than sometimes takes forever to reach the low-volume markets.

But in the low-volume markets what wins is usually better software support, and with it's mbed-os(and other software frameworks availble for ARM mcu's), ARM is surely to win here.

Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades

#25

Post by undrwatr » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 10:17 AM UTC

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326124

Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades

#26

Post by justincormack » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 10:17 AM UTC

minikites wrote: post #22

I see that it's 32-bit, is the year 2038 problem a significant concern for a device like this?

Not if you run an operating system/code with 64 bit time_t, like NetBSD or OpenBSD. I can't imagine you would run an OS on it though.

Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades

#27

Post by Dwolb » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 10:18 AM UTC

minikites wrote: post #22

I see that it's 32-bit, is the year 2038 problem a significant concern for a device like this?

I'd rather use another degree of freedom: how small can I make my battery?

Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades

#28

Post by richthegeek » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 10:27 AM UTC

antimagic wrote: post #15

fijal wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

british BTU or american BTU? please use SI standard measures for those who don't happen to live in America :-)

I'm trying to figure out if you're joking or not. BTU = British Thermal Unit and is pretty much the standard measure used around the world when talking about energy use associated with heating. It's the amount of energy needed to heat one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit, regardless of where you find yourself in the world...

As an additional data point, BTU isn't used in Britain very much these days. As with germany, kilowatt-hour is the preferred unit of (heating) energy.

Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades

#29

Post by cheradenine01 » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 10:34 AM UTC

rikkus wrote: post #17

Still waiting for clockless chips here...

Been done - on ARM instruction sets, no less.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor

Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades

#30

Post by rasz_pl » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 10:48 AM UTC

It all started with this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbNnNF9JHFQ

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tec...

ARM low power consumption was an accident caused by financial constrains. Small team with no money (Acorn was starting to go downhill at the time) forced Sophie Wilson/Steve Furber team to be clever with resources.

In 1987 hand routed ARM2 build with 30K transistors ran at 8MHz reaching 4 MIPS (of 32bit operations). Coincidentally Intels 386 build by an army of hundred engineers supplemented by state of the art emulation/validation/automation software (Mossim etc, &) and divided into large groups working on individual parts of the design achieved ... 4 MIPS at 33MHz using 275K 2x smaller transistors and >20x the power.

&http://webee.technion.ac.il/people/kolodny/ftp/IntelCADPaper...

&software born from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mead_%26_Conway_revolution and following Darpa programs