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In the wake of Intel announcing the world’s first 3-D transistor ^[4] that uses 35% less energy ^[5] than its counterparts, the company has now decided to kick their own energy record into oblivion. The processor giant just unveiled their Haswell CPU ^[6], a chipset that runs on nothing but direct solar power ^[7] and uses 20 times less energy ^[5] than equally powerful chipsets. In fact, this little bugger uses so little energy it has been displayed running off the light emitted from a regular lightbulb!

The Haswell product will be used in Intel’s “Ultrabooks”, a new group of ultra thin, fast computing machines that fit Intel’s vision of the future. This solar powered chipset does not include the rest of the computer’s hardware of course — keyboard, screen, motherboard, hard drives etc. — but the processor is a huge power drain and the upgrade in energy efficiency ^[5] is expected to greatly help the overall energy retention of the computer’s batteries.

The new 22-nanometer 3D-transistor architecture promises to up the computer’s battery life to 24 full hours, and 10 days of “connected standby”. Though the rest of your computer would need to be plug-in to play, the company explains that you could turn your display off and keep your processor running while synchronizing files and doing other internet-based jobs. This hounds like a computing dream to us — as our poor two year old MacBook Pro loses power ^[5] after just 30 minutes.

Intel says the chip will be available in 2013.

Via DVICE ^[8]