For decades, we’ve been trying to harness and convert energy from one form to another in hope of meeting our day-to-day power requirements. In winters, we use electricity to keep our home warm and cool in summers. Smarter Energystar homes improve this model but they still don’t remove the need for Power plants.

NanoHoldings would change our lifes forever.

The Future of Energy is all about Clean and Renewable energy that doesn’t require any of the oil, coal and nuclear power plants. Energy is going to be Free!

Watch the video, I’m sure you will be amazed.

Pythagoras Solar has come up with new Glass windows that fit into your apartments, offices and generate electricity throughout the day. In addition they can be used to control the light and heat entering the rooms. The company is calling it the industry’s “first energy efficient, transparent and high power-density photovoltaic glass unit”.

The new product could show up in curtain walls, skylights or windows. It both blocks the sun to keep it cool inside and captures sunlight to create solar energy.

The video below talks about how the Solar windows work:

And a preview of how much these solar Windows would cost:

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Scientists have built the world’s  smallest petrol engine that is tiny enough to power a Watch.

The mini-combustion engine can run for two years on a single dose of a light fuel.

To give you an estimate of the power, it produces 700 times more energy than a conventional battery despite having a size less than a centimetre long . If the technology continues to innovate with the same pace, it could be used to power laptops and mobile phones for months.

Energy evangelists believe that this new mini-motor can make batteries look conventional and even phase them out in half decade.

The engine has been produced by engineers at the University of Birmingham.

“We are looking at an industrial revolution happening in peoples’ pockets. The breakthrough is an enormous step forward. Devices which need re- charging or new batteries are a problem but in six years will be a thing of the past.”

These tiny engines would find applications in other fields such as medical, military gadgets, and future robots.

Today, charging an ordinary battery to deliver one unit of energy involves putting 2,000 units into it. This is due to the fact that energy is wated at several steps before it is effectively stored. On the contrary this engine produces energy locally,  and hence  is far more efficient.

Micro engines have been produced several times in the past, but all of them failed at dissipating heat to surroundings, and burned themselves over a small period of operation. The Birmingham team overcame this by using heat-resistant materials such as ceramic and silicon carbide. They brought together all the engineering disciplines, both materials, chemical engineering, civil engineering, and mechanical engineering.

We’re excited about this more than Bloom Energy,  a new Energy revolution.

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PowerMeter provides a great interface to monitor, track, analyze, and optimize power usage. Now manufacturers can integrate various appliances to enable advanced Energy monitoring. Google PowerMeter is a software application being was developed to help consumers track their home electricity usage. The development of the software is part of an effort by Google to invest in Green and Renewable energy initiatives

The API will make “energy information more widely available to consumers”.

Google has laid-out data model and the accompanying protocols to ensure that Google PowerMeter provides consumers access to their energy consumption with utmost care in maintaining the user’s privacy and control on access to the information.

In addition, google is providing some code samples to get developers started in building their first device which integrates with powerMeter.
If you are interested, checkout google’s  PowerMeter blog for timely updates on the service.

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In December, Google took steps to form Google Energy, a subsidiary formed with sole purpose of buying and selling electricity in bulk. In January, the company filed a request, and yesterday Google Energy has been granted an order by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission(FERC) to buy and sell energy at market rates. Then there was the announcement that the company was developing low cost mirrors for use in solar panels. And, of course, there’s the Google PowerMeter, which allows users to track electricity usage, as long as they have the proper equipment to upload the data.

So Google is all set for becoming the Electricity supplier? No, instead, Google wants more control over the high energy costs of its many data centers, and also aims to become greener.

“Right now, we can’t buy affordable, utility-scale, renewable energy in our markets. We want to buy the highest quality, most affordable renewable energy wherever we can and use the green credits.”

“We don’t have any concrete plans. We want the ability to buy and sell electricity in case it becomes part of our portfolio.”

Clearly, there’s a possibility that Google might become an energy provider sooner or later. There is some expectation that Google will actually enter the energy business at some point, whether it sells direct to consumers or partners with existing utility companies. Google will innovate in Greener ways of producing electricity and then sell it off at a much competitive price to the market.

But why would Google want to do something of that kind? Well ,the answer comes from the visionaries, the co-founders who are way to obsessed and inspired by so many things in life. Larry Page and Sergey Brin always have something new to talk about, and it’s never limited to IT.

All in all, Google is now social (Buzz), extended reach to Home Gigabit Internet as ISP, developing Mobile OS, Netbook OS and now they will power them all with, evidently, cheaper Electricity.

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Well, not really. They have been around since years but they haven’t lived up to user expectations. Nvidia will change that with their new Optimus technology (hopefully).

We are not talking about PowerMizer which only changes the clock (and that too is absent in Windows 7). It’s rather about switching between integrated and discrete graphics. Switching between integrated and discrete graphics started with physical toggles, which needed restarts, followed by Windows In-Tray utility that blanked your screen for a while.

Nvidia Optimus promises to make it all easier fro the end-user. When the system detects a 3D application, game or video, the GPU simply turns on. When its done, it goes back to the integrated GPU. There are no flips, banks or noticeable stoppages on the video.

You must be thinking, was it that tough to make this truly transparent all these years? Read on.

Previous graphics had multiplexers (MUXes) connecting both the integrated and discrete graphics to the display. This was costly, and required software to change the system’s rendering between the two graphics systems.

Optimus is a lot cleaner. When discrete GPU needs to switch, it powers up in a split second and copies the results of its frame-buffer to the frame-buffer of the integrated graphics chip over the PCIe bus. Because the system is technically always displaying the contents of the integrated graphics chip’s frame buffer, there is no flicker or blanking of the screen, and no series of MUXes required to connect them both to the display.

The other part of it is the software, which will detect the need and usage that relies on Nvidia’s drivers having application profiles for the games or applications. The technology will ultimately makes its way to other Nvidia driver features that require profiles, like SLI and 3D Vision.

Currently, Optimus supports pretty much all Intel notebooks: Core 2 Duo, Atom N4xx Pine trail, Core i3, i5, and i7. Optimus-enabled GPUs will be found in the GeForce 200M, 300M, Ion, and future-generation notebook GPUs.

Obviously, this not a revolution. This is something we expected to see already, but was absent. Ironically,  the average consumer assumes that switchable graphics already works the way Optimus does, so here we have a technology that finally delivers on customer expectations.

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AMD has announced a new chip is called the “Llano” processor which is not just a  CPU or GPU, instead, it’s a hybrid design that the chip company calls as an “Application Processor Unit,” or APU.

Intel’s current offering for the laptops is pretty limited in power they offer for graphics. They offer very-basic level of HD video playback, with DirectX 9 graphics to notebooks. AMD’s Llano will be combining a full DX11-compatible GPU with four CPU cores on a single 32nm processor die. This can literally swipe away all the Intel Laptop market.

At this time not much is known about the GPU, what we know is that the GPU offered by this APU combo is highly parallel vector. For the CPU, AMD has taken the “STARS” core that’s used in their current 45nm processor, shrunk them into a new 32nm SOI high-K process. AMD further added new power gating and dynamic power optimization capabilities to it. The result: 4Cores, each core has approx. 35 million transistors, and a 1MB L2 cache. It is planned to be clocked under 3Ghz and the power consumption would range between 2.5 to 25 watts(peek).

AMD will introduce another offering for the mobile called “Bobcat” which is more portable across a range of processes and configurations, and features less custom work that in Llano.

Llano will see some appearances in the later half of this year, and OEMs will be shipped around early 2011.

Power optimization
The most amazing part of this chip is it’s unique approach to dynamic power optimization. It is a step ahead from the traditional analog power management, towards digital, which makes it more accurate, efficient.

How Power optimization worked in current-gen. Processors: Normally, Power module takes analog input from a set of diodes placed throughout the die which act as thermal sensors, informing the module when the die heats up in an area due to increased compute activity.Temperature is the means for calculating power consumption.

Now, there is a problem with this approach: Ambient (surrounding) temperature changes (even minor ones) can change the values, make unwise decisions in setting the right clock speed and hence inefficient use of energy. And if the temperature changes are huge, like moving a laptop from A/C cabin to outdoors, the calculations go upto 40% incorrect.

However, Llano does it smartly. It uses a set of 95 bits of signals from different parts of the chip (pre-identified) are monitored, which have strong correlation to power consumption. This includes monitoring  integer traffic, cache misses, or branch mis-predicts via low-frequency sampling, which yields a very-high accuracy in determining the power usage.

AMD Fusion and future:

Clearly, AMD + ATI Fusion is now the way to go on notebooks. The combo/Fusion will reduce the Bus latency between CPU-GPU as they are now on the same Chip, making graphics faster and GPGPU apps more powerful.

Intel barely has any integrated GPU for 2011. Unless Intel buys NVIDIA, I don’t see them leading this segment.
On the other side,  NVIDIA’s upcoming x86 CPU + GPU combination would be interesting but we’ve to see how they perform in the CPU segment and not to forget they have some pending DMI licensing disputes.

Altogether, 2011 is going to be interesting for the notebook segment and It would make alot more sense even for general purpose apps to run on GPU with DxVA (DirectX Video Acceleration API) on Windows, VAAPI on Linux.

[via Inquirer]

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Hitachi has come up with a  face-recognizing television that intends to save power, whenever you are not watching it. The prototype consists of a camera that looks for a face in front of it and whenever you glance away, a power-saving mode like shutting off display or reducing LCD brightness comes into picture.

Though this demo features a text instead of actually saving power, but the actual commercial product will be saving power. Looks promising for a single user.

But wait a minute what if there are multiple viewers, it can endup with all sorts of confusions.  Particularly, if you’ve got a few viewers trying to watch from a few feet further away than the first one, does camera handle all such scenarios effectively? Possibly we will have to wait for the prototype to solidify into a product to get our answers.

Meanwhile, watch it in action:

NET refers to Internet which contains millions of routers, Billions of  hosts, trillions of users, several million meters of Fibers,  and 1000s Tera bytes of data flowing every second.

But when both are combined, it forms DOTNET or .NET, the world’s most monopolized & monotonized crappy programming language. Isn’t that Ironical ?