On day three of the Intel (News - Alert) Developer Forum (IDF 2011) this week, Justin Rattner, chief technology officer of the Santa Clara-based chip maker divulged the first details about the company’s research into the Near Threshold Voltage Processor (News - Alert) (NVTP)—which is able to operate at a level close to the actual voltage at which transistors begin conducting current. In fact, the processor is so efficient that, in a company demonstration, it ran on a postage stamp-size solar cell.

Code-named “Claremont,” the experimental IA microprocessor is capable of unprecedented low-power operation. Specifically, Near Threshold Voltage Processor circuits operate at around 400 to 500 millivolts (mV), while most digital designs today operate at nominal voltages of about 1 volt (V). While Intel hasn’t provided any details regarding how they managed to get past this limitation, it did showcase a processor built using NTVP technology that required less than 10mV to operate in an idle mode and between 400 and 500mV in load.

This leading-edge energy efficiency has the potential to support “always-on” devices, longer battery lives, and powerful many-core processors for use in everything from smartphones; to tablets, notebooks, desktops, and workstation PCs. The key challenge is to lock in the outstanding energy efficiency benefit at NTV, while mitigating performance loss.

While it is not expected to go into production, the techniques used for developing the NVTP could be applied to future Intel designs. For example, these developments could enable Intel architecture to expand into broader applications, such as embedded devices in home appliances and automobiles.

In fact, one goal of NTV research, according to Intel Principal Research Scientist Sriram Vangal, is to develop “zero power” architecture, in which power consumption is so low that digital devices could be powered with solar energy, or “off of the energy that surrounds us every day in the form of vibrations and ambient wireless signals.” He envisioned a future of “unfettered freedom,” in which “we can just leave our power cord and chargers behind.”

Finally, Rattner highlighted that NTV research is quickly maturing and the processor could be a key enabler for Extreme Scale Computing. Extreme scale means getting the most energy-efficient performance for the power spent—achieving 1,000x performance at only 10x the power, or perhaps 10x performance at one-tenth of the power. This could lead to “massive Exa-scale supercomputers, or put trillions of computations per second in our pockets”—all without environmental consequences.