14 DAY TRIAL // Once upon a time, the main, and possibly only, concern of hardware makers was coming up with new ways to improve the performance of their products. Intel and AMD strove to enhance the clock speeds of their CPUs, memory and storage makers kept looking for ways of increasing capacity, etc. Those times ended when the world economy started to feel the consequences of all the energy that such devices inevitably wasted. Consequently, companies finally decided to look for ways of reducing the power needed by their products.
Intel, as one of the biggest IT players in the world, naturally had to take a very active role in order to improve the efficiency of its chips. The latest netbook and smartphone parts show that progress is genuinely being made in this field. Unfortunately, memory products haven't exactly advanced at the same pace. At present, reducing the voltage on certain chips is not exactly possible, because microprocessor registers don't perform as they should in conditions of low power. This effectively means that there is a minimum current beneath which a chip must never drop.
Fudzilla has once again followed up on its role as purveyor of unofficial, unconfirmed but possibly genuine leaks and rumors by unraveling some of Intel's plans in regards to microprocessors. Supposedly, the Santa Clara, California-based company has come up with a way to resolve the registers' issues through use of so-called low-voltage resilient memories, which can cope with variations in leakage noises. This technology is said to be scalable to between 1-Volt and 340-mV.
Intel is supposedly showing off its findings at the 2010 Symposium on VLSI Circuits in Hawaii. Unfortunately, there is no knowing just how far along this research is and, thus, no indication of how long it will take for these resilient memories to incarnate as actual products.