Wireless Computer Smaller Than A Credit Card

Mike Howes (Winga) 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.

June 29, 2006 12:54 AM ET in News,

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

5 Comments:

  1. airbornflght
    29 Jun '06, 4:10 pm

    That is pretty kick butt right there.

  2. jhenry (Guest)
    29 Jun '06, 5:49 pm

    That sounds awesome.

    New wave of technology, here we come.

    My only concern: cooling. How would you keep something that tightly compacted cool?

  3. airbornflght
    29 Jun '06, 8:46 pm

    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.

  4. EMT
    30 Jun '06, 2:11 am

    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.

  5. airbornflght
    30 Jun '06, 2:42 am

    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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