Wireless Computer Smaller Than A Credit Card

WingaWinga MrSouth Africa Icrontian
edited June 2006 in Science & Tech
Israeli company Compulab has announced a computer that manages to cram a complete PDA into a device two-thirds the size of a credit card.

The CM-X270L has all the components required to run operating systems such as Linux and Windows CE. It somehow manages fits in an Intel XScale chip, half a gig of flash, 128MB of RAM, AC’97 sound and a Philips 802.11b wireless interface, as well as some things you wouldn’t find on a PDA, such as a PCI bus, 4 USB host ports and wired networking. An on-board 2700G Multimedia Accelerator enhances the feature set with support of XGA display resolution and MPEG-2 / MPEG-4 decoders.

Source: The Inquirer

Comments

  • airbornflghtairbornflght Houston, TX Icrontian
    edited June 2006
    That is pretty kick butt right there.
  • jhenry
    edited June 2006
    That sounds awesome.

    New wave of technology, here we come.

    My only concern: cooling. How would you keep something that tightly compacted cool?
  • airbornflghtairbornflght Houston, TX Icrontian
    edited June 2006
    Well, heat is produced from the ammount of power used, and how efficient the device is. If the device only consumes a few watts, and is very efficient, than it will not produce much heat, which is electrical energy converted to heat energy as joules.

    For example, if a device uses 1000 watts, but is 100% efficient, than no energy is wasted, thus theoretically, none could be given off as heat. The flipside, if the device uses 43 watts, and is only 46% efficient, it will be giving a lot of heat energy off relative to the ammount it is consuming. So that is what it is going to come down too.

    Chances are that it will be passively cooled.
  • EMTEMT Seattle, WA Icrontian
    edited June 2006
    But computers are generally not efficient at all. What forms of energy are converted from the input electricity? The light of your monitor, acoustical energy in your headphones... it doesn't add up to much compared to the consumption, and the difference has got to be heat. So a device would have to consume low amounts of power to produce low amounts of heat.
  • airbornflghtairbornflght Houston, TX Icrontian
    edited June 2006
    yes. I was just relating that heat will probably not be a big issue, as it will probably not consume alot. I know that computers are no where near efficient, I was just drawing the area that energy is transfered and converted, it just doesnt appear. so the device can emit no more heat energy than it consumes in electrical energy.
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