Intel Sees Future in Wind Power, Electric Cars
Now all we need are wind-powered cars.
Intel's known for providing some of the chipset and CPU technology in our computing rigs and notebooks, but the company also applies its technology to green efforts such as wind power and electric cars.
John Skinner, Intel's director of marketing for its Eco-Technology division said earlier this week that the chip company sees wind forecasting as one of the next big things – specifically in figuring out when the wind will blow and how fast.
"There's a lot of opportunities for sensor technology and high performance computing," he said in an interview on the sidelines of an industry conference, as reported by Reuters. "We are starting to explore it."
"We see numerical forecasting (in wind) as very interesting opportunity," he said, adding that "every extra bit of granularity and predictability" on wind power is very valuable.
Current wind turbines use 7-watt ultra low voltage Intel Celeron processors or the 10-watt Pentium M processor LV 738. Each turbine-mounted controller supports four 10/100Base-T Fast Ethernet ports, in addition to a wide range of DC power sources.
Electronic vehicles, by nature, require more silicon involvement than traditional cars. For that reason, Intel sees a chance to jump into the electric car market as well.
"Electric vehicles are going to contain a lot of electronics," he said. Intel believes it could play a role in energy management and range prediction. "It would be an extension of our business in telematics."
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Well thanks for stating the obvious, now get back to work on cutting costs!
Thats scary.. and anti virus company would make a tonne more money.. i wonder if i can overclock my car then...
"I'm a Computer techie!"
"AAHAHAHAHA THAT'S A THING OF THE PAST, NOW THERE'S CAR/HOUSE/COMPUTER TECHIES YOU OLD SCHOOL FOOL"
.___.
I can see this happening one day...
...one day...
Yep, you will have to be a computer hacker in the future to be safe from zombies.
What we really need is a for energy storage technology to evolve. That's probably our biggest technology shortcoming right now. Everything else has evolved at a Moore's Law pace, but not batteries. Their progress has been a very shallow, linear progression. If we had battery technology that was equivalence to today's processor technology, then wind, solar, hyrid-electric and full electric cars would become practical and truely economical. Until then, our best hope for migrating away from fossil-fuel generating plants is nuclear.
There's been some improvement in battery chemistry (I'm just now learning more about LiPO and LiFePO), but not enough.
Bottom line is, nuclear IS the way to go. Nuclear waste is not a small issue, but eliminating artificial barriers to reprocessing it would go a long way.