That is partly because they use a chip that is typically found in smartphones and tablets, not laptops.
But chips that do expression-profiling, by having probes for messenger RNA, are already starting to have diagnostic uses.Last year, two of Eric Lander's colleagues at the Whitehead Institute, Todd Golub and Donna Slonim, used a chip that could recognise messenger RNA from almost 7,000 genes to devise a simple test to distinguish between two types of leukaemia, known as AML and ALL.
The deCODEme service will use a chip that tests a person's DNA at one million sites along the genome.
Silicon microfabrication technology was used to develop a chip that can incorporate a live biological cell in its electrical circuit and thereby induce controlled electroporation in the cell.
In particular, exponential progress in the development of a high-density chip platform has led to robust studies with GWAS analysis, a method that uses a chip with hundreds of thousands of markers.
But the Ion Torrent machine uses a silicon chip that can detect the hydrogen ions given off when a new base is added to a strand of DNA.
A chip that uses optics may be different than what we use today.
At a time when Intel and Advanced Micro were focused on increasing speeds of their microprocessors, Transmeta was at work designing a chip that uses less power, saving battery power for laptops.
The Beam fits into the smartbook category, meaning it's a tiny laptop running on a chip that uses the ARM architecture rather than the x86 architecture favored by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
The new chips, highlighted at a big electronics tradeshow in Taiwan, represent the best effort by Intel engineers to walk the design line between a chip that uses little power and one that is powerful enough to keep users happy, especially those watching videos.
