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

arstechnica.com

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

#41

Post by colechristensen »

jacquesm wrote: post #19
zaroth wrote: post #2

The chip is so low power that it can be powered off energy capture from the body, as Andreas Eieland, Atmel's Director of Product Marketing for low-power products, demonstrated at CES earlier this year. The human body generates more bio-electricity than a 120v battery, and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with the Atmel SAM L21 32-bit ARM MCU, the machines had found... all the energy they would ever need.

That quote is so totally non-scientific. For movies to get basic physics so terribly wrong is very sloppy.

Early drafts had the machines using human brains as CPUs, but the idea was killed by suits who thought it'd be too hard to understand. It would have made the whole premise of the movie make much more sense.

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

#42

Post by fsloth »

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...

"It's the amount of energy needed to heat one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit"

Now, presume there is no gauge at hand to measure a pound less a thermometer to measure fahrenheits. Often outside of commonwealth territories and US we use SI :)

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

#43

Post by maxerickson »

Already__Taken wrote: post #32
mjburgess wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original script had machines using human brains for their computing power but the execs thought that would be too complicated for people to understand.

How would that script have ended? With humans required for computing power there's no way the machines give up their existence to release the humans. At least I can imagine them using alternate power sources with collaboration for the humans. Cleaning the sky for example.

They could still cooperate. The movies even had a human character who, having been given freedom, chose the Matrix.

(there could also be reasons for trade; maybe the humans spend time in the Matrix in exchange for energy or whatever)

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

#44

Post by TeMPOraL »

mjburgess wrote: post #31
jacquesm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a physics point of view it is complete bull-shit.

The original script had machines using human brains for their computing power but the execs thought that would be too complicated for people to understand.

With that little tweak the movie could be almost the same, except it would make actual sense.

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

#45

Post by tomswartz07 »

zaroth wrote: post #2

The chip is so low power that it can be powered off energy capture from the body, as Andreas Eieland, Atmel's Director of Product Marketing for low-power products, demonstrated at CES earlier this year. The human body generates more bio-electricity than a 120v battery, and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with the Atmel SAM L21 32-bit ARM MCU, the machines had found... all the energy they would ever need.

So, I'm curious how they convert the body heat to electricity in such a small area.

If it were for something like a Stirling Cycle, you'd need a fairly substantial surface area to disburse the heat difference.

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

#46

Post by ant6n »

maxerickson wrote: post #40
logicallee wrote: post #38

meanwhile the latest and greatest 2015 device is an all-day wristwatch the weight of a pack of cards [1] (for the smaller Apple watch [2]) that in Apple's own "watch test" tells time for up to 48 days before dying --- whoops, no, I meant 48 hours [3] : >Testing conducted by Apple in March 2015 using preproduction Apple Watch and software paired with an iPhone using preproduction software with 5 time checks (4 seconds…

Sure, the Apple watch is fairly likely to be a ridiculous geegaw. It's also going to do a lot more than the mechanical watches you are comparing it to. If you just want to tell time, there is a wide market of solar watches: http://www.casio-intl.com/asia-mea/en/wat/standard/solar_pow... http://www.seiko-cleanenergy.com/watches/solar/ The Seiko tech runs for 6 months with no charging (left in total darkness).

I wonder what the actually numbers for these watches are. Energy received via the solar cell, energy consumption, battery capacity.

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

#47

Post by ant6n »

logicallee wrote: post #38

meanwhile the latest and greatest 2015 device is an all-day wristwatch the weight of a pack of cards [1] (for the smaller Apple watch [2]) that in Apple's own "watch test" tells time for up to 48 days before dying --- whoops, no, I meant 48 hours [3] : >Testing conducted by Apple in March 2015 using preproduction Apple Watch and software paired with an iPhone using preproduction software with 5 time checks (4 seconds…

Pebble lasts a week

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

#48

Post by deutronium »

raverbashing wrote: post #12
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...

Well... PIC is weird. But it does the job and as the other comment said, they had a lot of models with a lot of devices (ADC, DAC, USB, fully configurable ports, etc). Also cheap and available in "hobbyist" form factors (DIP) Yes, you would either go to Assembly (which is harder to use than "tradicional uCs" - like 8051 family, Z80, etc), C compilers (some limited), or there was even PIC basic, heh ARM? Write in C, "…

I quite liked PIC stuff for the hardware USB support, which I used with a PIC32 DIP chip. They also have a gcc port for their architectures now, which is quite nice xc8,16,32. Although apparently the 'free' version of it, doesn't provide all optimizations annoyingly.

I'm starting to use ARM dev boards now, because of things like the MHz and the nice compilers available.

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

#49

Post by Perdition »

rasz_pl wrote: post #30

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 reachin…

I don't think that is a fair comparison. The 386 was a true CISC design while the ARM2 was RISC. One of the major points of RISC was to reduce silicon complexity by using a less complex design (and shoving the complexity onto software).

Intel could have built an equal or better chip than the ARM2 but they were worrying about servicing the already established market for x86.

P.S. Is it even reasonable to compare MIPS between RISC and CISC designs? A RISC chip has to execute several instructions to do what can be done in one CISC instruction.

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

#50

Post by [deleted] »

yen223 wrote: post #35
jacquesm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That quote is so totally non-scientific. For movies to get basic physics so terribly wrong is very sloppy.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who isn't terribly bothered by sloppy science in movies. I prefer movies that are entertaining or thought-provoking, not factual. Besides, the Matrix is about how our world is a simulation - who's to say how physics works in their "real" world?

[deleted]
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