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Greenpeace is pointing their fingers at big IT industry manufacturers and distributors for not caring about the environment. They are also warning people that most so called old recycled computers are actually instead sent to some underdevelopped parts of asia and africa where slaves are melting motherboards and PC circuits with their bare hands to extract the little materials and metals they can that have any resale value on the black markets. So do not believe all those that want to export containers filled with your old computers to give to people in the third world. In some cases 75% of the old computers are unusable, they consume more power then there is available and thus the scheme is only using the charity as a means to escape and illegally monetize electronic waste. The USA doesn’t even have a policy to prevent electronic waste traffic. Hundreds of tons of electronic waste is shipped from the USA every year to be dumped and processed by slaves in the third world. Current PC components in most computers other then the OLPC have toxic chemicals in them that harm those poor people that melt them and that pollute the water and the ground where it is dumped.

Pankaj Kedia is the Director of the MID program at Intel. The Mobile Internet Device is based on the new Intel Atom X86 processor, which should consume less power at similar X86 performance as previous Intel Ultra Low Voltage processors. The Atom systems might be able to dissipate low enough heat to be able to run without fan. Some of the MIDs will be using Linux OSes that permits to optimize the interfaces to the lowest possible system requirements. During this interview, Pankaj Kedia explains how the Atom processor works, when it will be available, how much it will cost, what makes the difference between the regular Atom and the Atom Centrino. No talk on camera though comparing Intel’s Atom to the AMD Geode or VIA C7M’s performance, price and power consumption.

The latest Classmate PC versions released by Intel for $550 do not seem to use the Atom processor yet. So the Atom processor might not be available in cheap laptops before later this year and perhaps not in the cheapest laptops before next year. The first Atom based products though as the MIDs are supposed to be released by the second half of this year already. But some of the MID devices like the Gigabyte M528 to use Atom processors are announced to cost $900, so not yet confirmed to provide a definite lower price then ULV based products.