New battery technology hopes to cut the cost of storage by 80 percent compared to lithium storage.

The sodium-ion battery can be made from salt and myo-inositol and would be several orders of magnitude cheaper than lithium.

Applications for the new technology would include grid-scale storage for utilities and home solar. While improvements are still in the works, the energy density at this stage of would likely prohibit any kind of mobile application.

Source:
Stanford News
Nature

Jackery USA, a portable battery manufactuerer based in California, has crowd-funded their latest product, the PowerBar.

The stand-out feature is the addition of AC charging capability, allowing the device to charge an infinite range of products, from laptops to hand tools. The product also features Qualcomm® Quick Charge™ 3.0, as well as USB-C charging.

At a whopping 20800mAh, the AC also expands the range of applications beyond recharging, to being a power source for any number of low wattage applicances.

Wondering, could it blend itself?

The product is available now for a limited time on Indiegogo.

AMD announced a new line of energy efficient GPUs for embedded and mobile applications. The AMD Empedded Radeon E9170 series and E6465 series, with the E9170-series being the more advanced of the two, promising 1.2TFLOPS of compute power and 5 x 4K 60Hz output.

Targetted applications are arcade and casino games, which will benefit greatly from reduced energy consumption and better performance. Mobile applications are likely as well, but not marketed heavily in the AMD product page. It will likely find its way into a wide range of thin clients and laptop computers.

Energy consumption ranges from 35-50W for the E9170 series and 28W on the E6465 series. 13 models were announced in Mobile PCI Express Module (MXM), PCIe, and low-profile PCI formats.

Source AMD Press Release