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

#61

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 2:39 PM UTC

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?

If you want something to be 'thought provoking' then make it as close to reality as you can, that's good SF. The only thoughts this provokes in me is 'ouch'.

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

#62

Post by mrec » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 2:44 PM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #41

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.

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.

Dan Simmon's 'Hyperion' trilogy used this idea (before Matrix) and I seem to recall it being one of the less silly things in there. A book can afford to be less mass-market-friendly than a movie, obviously, but I think it did pretty well.

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

#63

Post by maxerickson » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 2:53 PM UTC

ant6n wrote: post #46

maxerickson wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some bookending it is as least possible. They imply that the draw is no more than 1/60th the input (1 minute of sun for 1 hour). The 3 hours for 6 months would be much lower, checking their documentation, it enters a low power mode that freezes the hands (it still keeps time, the hands are advanced when power becomes available).

The input is limited to something like 10 square cm (that's a bit more than 3 cm by 3cm, or a circle ~3.5 cm across). 1000 watts / square meter is usually used as peak sun, so the max input would be ~1 watt (but actual energy captured would probably be more like 1/10 of that).

3 Watt hours is a very respectable figure for a AA battery, so it clearly isn't storing that much power. After looking up that figure, 10% efficiency for the solar cell is probably high.

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

#64

Post by T-hawk » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 3:00 PM UTC

Perdition wrote: post #49

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…

Intel did in fact build a RISC chip contemporary with the 386/486: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860

It had great instruction throughput performance by the specs but lacked in real applications, thanks to the sufficiently smart compilers never coming to be.

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

#65

Post by Symmetry » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 3:04 PM UTC

mapt wrote: post #18

nezza-_- wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is quoting The Matrix: The human body generates more bioelectricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion, the machines had found all the energy they would ever need.

Which of course always bugged me. Not just because of what I know of biology, but the second sentence. "Combined with a form of fusion". The thing we understand to eventually provide abundant clean unlimited electricity (okay, relatively speaking). It's a bit like saying "The human trigger finger can exert 300 pounds per square inch of force, and perform over 500,000 foot-pounds of work. Combined with a standard-issu…

In the original script the machines used fusion for power and human brains for extra processing power but that was cut because people thought audiences would find it too confusing.

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

#66

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 3:04 PM UTC

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.

Humans could volunteer their brain power for some periods of time and both men and the machines could focus on rebuilding after the war and manufacturing enough processing power for the machines to live alongside mankind.

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

#67

Post by nemik » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 3:09 PM 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?

Just because it's 32-bit doesn't mean its code can't store 64-bit ints. There's just a few more instructions that are needed to manipulate it. But it's not a big deal.

That's how computers are able to store, retrieve, and manipulate any variables (like strings) that might be bigger than their address space.

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

#68

Post by zokier » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 3:11 PM 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?

That is purely a software issue. Word size does not limit how big numbers computer can handle, it just implies how big numbers it can handle efficiently. Even lowly 8-bit computers/microcontrollers can do arbitrary precision/bignum math.

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

#69

Post by DickingAround » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 3:23 PM UTC

Symmetry wrote: post #65

mapt wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which of course always bugged me. Not just because of what I know of biology, but the second sentence. "Combined with a form of fusion". The thing we understand to eventually provide abundant clean unlimited electricity (okay, relatively speaking). It's a bit like saying "The human trigger finger can exert 300 pounds per square inch of force, and perform over 500,000 foot-pounds of work. Combined with a standard-issu…

In the original script the machines used fusion for power and human brains for extra processing power but that was cut because people thought audiences would find it too confusing.

This makes potentially way more sense... except when the machines by themselves are supposed to be super-smart. Well, fiction isn't perfect. But it's always better when it aims for more plausibility..

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

#70

Post by jschwartzi » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 3:23 PM 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?

Probably not. These would be useful in wireless sensors and other devices where having an accurate absolute time is not as important as knowing precisely how fast time is ticking away. If I were going to use something like this I probably wouldn't even bother noting the absolute time of a sample at the point of measurement. Rather, I would just periodically synchronize the network with a clock pulse and let each individual node figure out whether they're running fast or slow, and by how much, if it even matters.

If it doesn't then just note the time of arrival at whatever server is controlling the network and use that time exclusively. Then you can buy one 64-bit machine and leave it running all the time, and as an added bonus you no longer need to worry about whether each node has the correct time.