Day three of the Intel Developer Forum is usually when the firm shows off its future projects and Chipzilla’s in-house anthropologist Dr Genevieve Bell took to the keynote stage to demonstrate a processor powered by wine and mobile phones that use your gait or voice as a password.

Bell, who thanks to her Australian outback upbringing is possibly the only Intel executive who knows how to get drinkable water out of a frog (hint: it’s not very good for the frog) has been studying some of the problems of mobile computing. Chief among these is power, and Bell demonstrated an extremely low-powered processor and accelerometer that was powered by a glass of wine.

The wine glass had two electrodes that reacted with the acetic acid in red wine to produce a trickle of current. Schoolchildren have been making potato batteries for years in a similar way, but Bell wanted to demonstrate that even a tiny amount of power could run Intel silicon.

“Some people turn water into wine, here at Intel we’re turning wine into electricity,” Bell said. “It’s possible to start to imagine a world of incredibly low power but also with high performance, which will help unburden us, help us do things that are remarkable and gives the ability to power things like constant sensing, communication, and computing – all of which are necessary for our mobile future.”