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One Laptop Per Child gets Big Boost in Quarter-Million Unit Order from India

Paul Lilly — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 09:15:31 -0500

The ambitious One Laptop Per Child project was started with high hopes of bringing low-cost connected laptops to children in developing countries, an idea that so far has struggled to spread the way it was originally conceived. Giving the project a big boost, the government of India plans to purchase 250,000 of OLPC's XO laptops.

The big order comes as somewhat of a surprise. OLPC had once before tried to win favor in India with a pilot program that saw 20 XO laptops distributed to students in Khairat-Dhangarwada village in the state of Maharashtra, Arstechnica reports. Despite being a success, the country's Ministry of Human Resource Development raised concerns about what adverse health effects might arise from prolonged laptop use.

This time around, the 250,000 laptops will be sent to 1,500 schools, and that might be only the tip of the iceberg. OLPC India CEO Satish Jha said he hopes to ship 3 million laptops in India this year.

Image Credit: OLPC

OLPC Switches to VIA Processors

Pulkit Chandna — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:20:59 -0500

The One Laptop per Child project has chosen Via’s low-wattage C7-M processor for a revised version of its XO laptop. The inexpensive XO laptop currently ships with AMD’s Geode LX processor, but AMD has decided to retire the processor. OLPC has made it clear that the Via-powered XO laptop - which the OLPC has dubbed “Generation 1.5” – will not be a major hardware refresh.

"The design goal is to provide an overall update of the system within the same ID and external appearance," OLPC’s VP of hardware development, John Watlington, announced on Friday. The revised version, which is due in November, will feature 1GB DDR2 SDRAM (currently 256MB) and up to 8GB flash storage (currently 1GB). OLPC will abandon the x-86 processor platform and adopt an ARM-based processor in its stead as part of its Generation 2.0 refresh.

AMD: There Will be no Successor for the Geode

Andy Salisbury — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 14:06:49 -0600

Yesterday AMD announced that they had no plans to replace their aging Geode chip. Its low power consumption made it an ideal candidate for the XO laptops, but now the future for this deal remains uncertain.

“There are no plans for a follow-on product to today's available AMD Geode LX products, but we expect to make this very successful processor available to customers as long as the market demands,” stated Phil Hughes, a spokesman with AMD.

Reportedly AMD is working closely with OLPC to remain the chipmaker for the XO-2 laptop. But, it is expected that given their lack of next-generation low power consumption chips, it will be difficult.

Image Credit: AMD

Amazon Launches OLPC "Give 1 Get 1" Laptop Drive

Paul Lilly — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:35:22 -0600

One Laptop Per Child's "Give 1 Get 1" program is making a comeback, only this time the OLPC association has teamed with Amazon.com in hopes of ironing out any kinks in the ordering and distribution process. Amazon will start taking order for XO laptops on Monday, November 24 and promises to ship the devices within 30-days, at least in the U.S. Those ordering from the U.K. and elsewhere will be taken from Amazon's U.K. site and will start shipping in the first quarter of next year, or possibly later.

The Give 1 Get 1 program ran for six weeks last year, and in that time managed to sell 160,000 XO laptops. And since more people decided to donate the machine rather than keep one, over 100,000 XO laptops ended up going to school kids in countries like Haiti and Rwanda.

"The phenomenal success of last year's Give 1 Get 1 program created tremendous demand from both the public who wanted to give more and from countries that saw an opportunity to attack poverty through education," said Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of OLPC, in a statement."

The Give 1 Get 1 promotion runs $400, in which one machine goes to a child in a developing country and the other to the donor who placed the order. Alternately, donors can opt to give away as many individual laptops as they want for $200 per XO.

Image Credit: OLPC

Intel Comments on Atom Shortage

Justin Kerr — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 14:20:03 -0500

Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini had a bounce in his step going into his shareholder briefing on Tuesday. Intel’s continued dominance over AMD and a solid earnings report has left his investors glad they placed their money in hardware rather then software. Investors on the other hand are nothing if not fickle. The conference call quickly turned into a debate over the shortage of Atom processors and weakness in Intel’s flash memory business. Put on the defensive Paul Otellini hinted that Atom isn’t the chip maker’s primary focus. "(Atom) is less than a third the performance of our Centrino (processor). You're dealing with something that most of us wouldn't use," he said. He further goes on to clarify that Atom is aimed at the emerging Netbook audience and is a way that Intel can grow without cannibalizing its other processor offerings. He continued to reassure investors that Intel has plenty of Atom chips in stock and back end improvements to testing as well as increased production of chipsets should solve the problem. Intel has been steadily increasing its production capacity of the popular CPUs since November.

Atom is the brand name for Intel’s new low wattage x86 CPUs aimed at the Netbook and small consumer electronics market. Atom (code-named Silverthorne) is designed for a 45 nm process but will be revamped in 2009 to include a die shrink to 32 nm. Clock speeds for the CPU range from 800 MHz to 1.87 GHz and can be a single, or dual core design. Contrary to popular belief, Silverthorne was not specifically designed to compete with AMD’s Geode system on a chip used in the OLPC (One Laptop per Child). Rather, they will use the Diamondville platform running on the ultra low cost Mini-ITX motherboards to bring better performance and Hyperthreading to the game. Intel won’t be releasing a “system on a chip” design until its next generation of Atom processors code named “Lincroft” are launched sometime in 2009. Currently Intel’s main competition is with Nvidia’s Tegra processors which debuted in June 2008. Tegra sports pretty impressive performance but its use of the ARM RISC architecture puts it at a clear disadvantage against the popular x86 approach used in most home PC’s today.