Be a part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the internet. The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate. Shutdown your personal computer tomorrow and see if you can stand for 24 hours without a PC. Click here to find out more.

Owners of AMD laptops know that AMD is working very hard to extend laptop battery life while maintaining a nice performance. Intel has been working just as hard to beat AMD at their own game, and with the Santa Rosa platform, it looks like Intel is becoming a serious threat to the battery life crown. And so, AMD will be updating the Kite platform, which hosts the Turion processors. The new Kite platform will support DDR2 RAM, 65nm "Hawk" processors, and socket S1. The new Kite platform will be based on the AMD RS690T chipset, which is a low power variant of the AMD RS690 desktop chipset. The graphics will be provided by an integrated solution not unlike the X700 series. The southbridge chipset will be an SB700, which will provide the various IO functions. We should see the new Kite sometime this year. AMD will further their work in saving power sometime in 2008, by applying some K10 architecture ideas to the "Griffen" architecture. As I said before, AMD is aiming to break the five-hour barrier for battery life, and not by buying a bigger battery.

Further demonstrating its commitment to lead the world to energy-efficient computing, AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced strong ecosystem support for DTX, the open standard specification driven by AMD to enable the broad development of small form factor (SFF) PCs. DTX has been developed to empower industry stakeholders to deliver innovative, energy-efficient small form factor solutions that are smaller, quieter, and desktop-friendly, all while delivering rich visual experiences. Companies including Akasa, Albatron, ASUS, Asetek, Compucase, ECS, Founder, FSP, Gigabyte, Hedy, NVIDIA, Shuttle, SilverStone Technology, Thermaltake, and Tongfang have expressed support for DTX, as well as their intent to develop and bring innovative solutions to market designed that benefit both businesses and consumers.

You are bored by the glossy plastic notebooks from Apple or these shiny metal covered laptops which you have to polish everytime you put a finger onto the surface? Then you might be the type of a person who prefers a wooden texture. The people at c|net got the opportunity to play with the Asus EcoBook which you can buy sometime next year. I was really amazed by the details of the wooden panels. These panels are changeable in case they get scratched and of course they are biodegradable.

In 2004 AMD launched the 50x15 Initiative that will hopefully help to enable affordable Internet access and computing capability for 50 percent of the whole world's population by the year 2015. Now AMD together with SUN Microsystems presented the Open Architecture Prize to further develop this achievement and bring creative ideas to life. The 250.000 US$ prize will be donated every year for the design that fulfils the given task at best. This year's project is to create an "e-community center" - "a centralized building equipped with internet connectivity solutions designed to enable an entire community to access the transformative power of the Internet".

Windows Vista brags that it is one of the most efficient operating systems ever. AMD brags about how their Cool N Quiet technology helps save power. In the age of ROHS and Energy Star compliance, it sure seems like saving energy is a very important feature in computers. However, AMD has left out this little feature of just about every one of their recent processors in Windows Vista. There have been over 100 posts in a thread dedicated to begging AMD for Cool N Quiet support on Vista. We have yet to see anything from AMD on this issue. The Inquirer has been asking AMD for a comment for quite some time, but it seems that AMD is being cool and very quiet on this subject.

Gaming consoles are getting more and more popular these days. That is not only because the integrated hardware is fast and games will be compatible for years but they are much more than a stupid gaming box. You can play movies utilitzing CDs, DVDs or even Blu-Ray discs, surf the net and whatnot. But what about their power consumption? All these shiny features won't come for free, do they? Now the guys from HardCoreWare come into play. They took a PS3, a Wii and a XBOX 360, fired them up with different tasks and compared the power consumption to a mid sized gaming rig. You will be surprised with what conclusion they came up with.

Daylight saving time arrives a little earlier - March 11 - and stays a little later - Nov. 4 - this year. And it's bringing a problem along with it that could affect everything from stock trades to airline schedules to your BlackBerry.

Software created before the law mandating the change passed in 2005 is set to automatically advance its timekeeping by one hour on the first Sunday in April, not the second Sunday in March. Congress decided that more early evening daylight would translate into energy savings.

The result is a glitch reminiscent of the Y2K bug, when cataclysmic crashes were feared if computers interpreted the year 2000 as 1900 and couldn't reconcile time appearing to move backward. If banks and other institutions aren't properly prepared, automatic stock trades reportedly might happen at the wrong hour, buildings that unlock at a certain time could stay shut, and airline flight schedules could be scrambled.MSNBC

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 11, 2007 - Intel Corporation researchers have developed the world's first programmable processor that delivers supercomputer-like performance from a single, 80-core chip not much larger than the size of a finger nail while using less electricity than most of today's home appliances. This is the result of the company's innovative 'Tera-scale computing' research aimed at delivering Teraflop -- or trillions of calculations per second --performance for future PCs and servers. Technical details of the Teraflop research chip will be presented at the annual Integrated Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week in San Francisco.

AMD today announced development of DTX, an open standard specification designed by AMD to enable the broad adoption of small form factor PCs. The DTX standard will be designed to empower OEMs, ODMs, and component vendors to deliver innovative solutions to market that are smaller, quieter, and desktop-friendly, while leveraging commonalities within the ecosystem that benefit both customers and end users. The DTX standard will take advantage of the existing ATX infrastructure and benefits, including cost efficiency, system options and backward-compatibility, to allow for ground-breaking PC design. A review copy of the DTX specifications is planned to be made available by AMD in Q1 2007.

Samsung Electronics has developed a docking station containing a 1200-watt-hour fuel cell, which is capable of powering a laptop for an enormous length of time. Designed for Samsung's Q35 ultra portable notebook, this dock can potentially power the machine for eight hours a day, five days a week for one month. The company is now working on a miniature version to provide 15 hours of power. This dock should hit the shops towards the end of 2007.

Intel plans to announce its Core 2 Solo single-core processors in Q3 2007. Instead of normal edition, the upcoming Core 2 Solo has ULV (Ultra Low-Voltage) edition only. The new Core 2 Solo ULV includes two models: U2200 (1.2 GHz/1MB L2/533MHz) and U2100 (1.06 GHz/1MB L2/533MHz). They are set to replace the U1500 and U1400 processors. These two models have only 5W power consumption and support for Intel VT, EIST, XD Bit and Intel EM64T. All Core 2 Solo ULV CPUs will be released in Socket M interface instead of Socket P for Santa Rosa.

In a move that shows some care for the environment, Google and a few other companies are planning to turn their car parks and buildings in solar power sources. By putting solar panels on their Mountain View building in California, along with building mounted panels over some of the car parks, Google hopes to cut back on the power it draws from the national grid by providing almost a third of the power it will use. 9,000 solar panels will be used to provide 1.6 megawatts of power, and fitting them will prove quite a challenge on Google's angled roofs.

SUNNYVALE, CALIF. -- December 5, 2006 --Launching the next generation of energy-efficient computing, AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced the transition to 65nm process technology, beginning with the immediate availability of energy-efficient AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core desktop processors. The move to 65nm process technology enables AMD to produce more processors on a 300mm wafer, for increased production capacity, while continuing to aggressively scale performance and reduce power consumption. AMD processors built with 65nm line-widths are designed to deliver exceptional performance when running multiple applications, as well as enable small form factor PCs that complement both home and office environments. By mid-2007, AMD expects to be fully converted to 65nm production at Fab 36. With the rapid conversion to 65nm process technology, AMD is scaling capacity intelligently to meet growing demand worldwide for x86 processors.

While the program may look like it only has settings easily found in your screen-saver menu, Local Cooling claims to save lots of energy. Enough energy to save a firm using 100 computers over $2000 a year. The clever program has a graphically friendly way to access energy saving system settings such as monitor turn-off times. It also lists the estimated power consumption of all hardware attached to the computer, including graphics cards, processors, and monitors. UniBlue made the application in an effort to cut energy costs in their own network. With a few tweaks, they made a free public version that you can download here.