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Aleutia’s 4.5 inch E1 could be a good indicator of the future of computers. It’s a solar-powered Linux and runs on 8 watts of power. It has no moving parts and is totally silent. The optional solar panel will add slightly to the low $400 price tag. Even though it has relatively small storage and ram, with computing moving more online and using flash memory, this computer could have lots of applications.

Mobile phones, notebook computers, iPods—the boom in portable computing and communications devices is dependent on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries to deliver power. These batteries offer the highest energy density, allow laptops to function for useful amounts of time, and do not display a memory effect when compared to other types of rechargeable batteries. However, modern rechargeable batteries are still not truly satisfactory.

For computer experts focused solely on performance, June and November mark the twice-yearly release of the TOP500 list, which ranks the world's supercomputers in terms of "teraflops," or trillions of calculations per second (the "flop" comes from "floating-point operations," a technical term for computer calculations). That list is currently led by a supercomputer at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) that has a peak speed of more than 596 teraflops. But the November 2007 list of supercomputing speed freaks was accompanied by a newcomer, the Green500 list, which reworks the TOP500 list in terms of energy efficiency. The Green500 list ranks the 500 fastest supercomputers by megaflops per watt, that is, by how many thousands of calculations are performed per watt of energy consumed.

Thanks to the efforts of more than 35 manufacturers, a wide range of computer products now include internal power supplies that are at least 80% efficient, that is, less than 20% of the power fed into them is lost as heat