Lithium-Sulfur Batteries Unveiled 270
mobilemag writes "Sion Power is showing off its new Lithium-Sulfur battery design this week at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC). SION believes that its new Lithium-Sulfur (Li-S) batteries are the answer to the power hungry devices on the market today."
Very nice. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah right. (Score:4, Insightful)
Right, so much for 'news'. Call me when "still 3-5 years away" becomes "now available", then we'll give it a good look. As for fuel cells, they have been coming "Real Soon Now" (C) since... What? ... 2000 or so? Chances are we'll be stuck with Li-Ion batteries for quite a few years to come.
Light on details? (Score:5, Insightful)
Standard Cell Sizes? (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing that's so attractive to me about NiMH's is they come in standard AAA and AA sizes. I make sure all my electronics take those (instead of say Lithimum Ion, which is usually proprietary), and then I can run everything on the same "fleet" of batteries.
I hope this tech follows suit. (I imagine it won't at first, but will eventually)
Re:Fix a different problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the approach that Apple takes. Their iBook line gets ~4 hours on a single charge. The problem is that they're bumping up against the lower limits of power consumption while still offering reasonable performance. If you want lower power consumption, you're going to have to give something up. That something is screen size, processor speed, hard disk, and memory.
Personally, I'd like a little Pu-238 to power my laptop with. I figure that about 600 grams would power my laptop nonstop for ~40 years.
... or reduce power consumption! (Score:4, Insightful)
The major reason we need these ultra-fast and hot Pentiums in our machines is crap, inefficient software. Look at Longhorn: it wants 2G of RAM and a two CPUs.
A friend of mine has a RiscOS box running a 100MHz ARM cpu. It is slicker than my Winshit PC with a 2GHz processor.
Re:Light on details? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fix a different problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:... or reduce power consumption! (Score:3, Insightful)
The point is that you do not really have to use XP or even an x86 CPU. Those programs could be compiled for other chips and OSs.
Some day X86 is going to run out of steam.
Re:... or reduce power consumption! (Score:1, Insightful)
I'll trade you my 100MHz ARM CPU for your 2GHz processor.
Heck here's a 486 running Linux, I'm sure you'll be fine using lynx, vim, and pine. Hey you said you wanted slick and fast.
You're comparing a Laptop and a PDA. One has a large screen, harddrive, and powerful CPU. Check up a few posts on Apples hardware. You can make things only so efficent before you bump into a wall.
Re:what is the big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sulphur: 2*4.5 = 9 Wh
NiMH : 1.25*5 = 6.25 Wh
So sulphur is better, if not by that much.
More powerful batteries are nice, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
furthermore: stop writting/using bloated software!!! i can run my word processor/ of choice on a couple mb or ram, with the HD spun down for hours.... on a machines with less than 20mb of ram and a 33mhz processor... of course i use these same applications on more modern hardware.
point is: efficient software/hardware can save much more power than these new batteries can provide. yeah, new batteries are great- but why does simple computing have to be so damn energy intensive???
The radiation might not be the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
This [llnl.gov] and other articles state that the toxicity of Pu is not that critical, since it will be immobilized in sediments or soil. But I do not fully trust this argument. Pu just like Pb is stored in living organism to some extent, and will probably accumulate in animals along the food chain. Maybe this is not a problem in the short term, like it was a problem with lead from car fuels, but probably in the mid to long term.