On 21-9-2009 15:10, Verm wrote:
> clipka wrote:
>> Invisible schrieb:
> 
>> With a laptop about as large as an A4 sheet of paper - about 100 
>> square inch - that would give you... 7 Watts. Not /quite/ the order of 
>> magnitude you'd probably need...
> 
> That's nearly enough to power a low-power laptop.
> The OLPC (one laptop per child) scheme says their laptops are limited to 
> use 15 Watts
> http://laptop.org/en/laptop/hardware/specs.shtml

That is what they are limited to. IIRC the goal was about 2W as you can 
generate that as a human being of child like proportions. Might be in 
this video 
http://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_negroponte_on_one_laptop_per_child_two_years_on.html



> So 7 watts is nearly there - you could fit a fold-out panel on the back 
> of the laptop or do something cunning with mirrors / fresnel lenses to 
> focus more sun on the panel.
> 
> I believe my mini ITX server uses 10 - 20 W depending on load and it's a 
> 1 Ghz machine with a fullsize hard drive but no display and it's not the 
> most efficient design out there.
> 
> On the other hand "my" blade centre with 12 quad core servers in it uses 
> 1700 W which is more than 3x my house's average consumption.

There is that story about, I think, Shell that they build a new building 
with a giant heater for the winter, just when everything was nearly 
finished they brought in a supercomputer that needed a giant cooling 
system. A bit more communication would have saved a lot of money.

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