She's a semifinalist. I hope Intel's judgement of her research isn't affect by the press coverage. It would suck for someone else's superior research to get shafted because he wasn't lucky enough to be appealing as a human-interest story.

Thanks for the link. I was thinking of the Medfield SoC in the same context as the Raspberry Pi, which uses a Broadcom ARM SoC. That's my next computer. Silence is beautiful, especially the variety you get when there's a blackout. "Ahhh..." I also like that silent computers usually mean energy-efficient computers, and long-lasting computers with fewer moving parts. There's something aesthetically pleasing about that. I think all chipmakers are trying to reduce energy consumption, since this is a desirable feature for many markets they serve (server farms, laptops, smartphones/tablets). Blissful silence is a happy by-product.

I don't care about smartphones, but this is great news for silent and low-power computing enthusiasts. I'm hope we can look forward to this SoC being used to power fan-less, silent systems.

I don't encrypt my email, because nobody gives a fuck about my private correspondence, except the recipients (I hope).

Thanks, that was a good answer.

Sorry, I wrote "energy" in the title. I know that not all the energy is converted to electricity.

Does anyone have a rough idea of how much electricity could be produced by this type of reactor using the 87 tons plutonium stockpile? Please express in terms of % of annual electricity consumption by Britain, or another unit readable by laymen.

This is exactly how I became interested in Linux. Then, I tried it, and none of my plug-and-play devices worked, and I was expected to write my own drivers or stop complaining, and I went back to Windows. Windows 7 is the best Windows so far. I am fully satisfied with it. I run Debian in VirtualBox as a coding environment.

Thank you for your response.