The first $100 laptop prototypes are to reach children in the developing world in the next few days, the consortium developing them has said.
The One Laptop Per Child laptops, conceived and produced by a philanthropic group of designers and engineers led by Nicholas Negroponte - co-founder of the Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology - would begin arriving "within the next week," the project's chief technical officer, Mary Lou Jepsen, explained.She told that the design of the $100 laptop was highly innovative, centring on a CPU, or processor, that saves power by knowing when to turn itself off.
"The reason the CPU is usually on on a laptop is simply to refresh the screen, so in the timing controller chip for the display we put some memory - so when nothing's changing on the screen, it goes into self-refresh mode to save power," she explained.
"Half the kids in the world have little or no access to power, so it's been much harder to make a two-watt laptop."It's two watts because a kid can then use a crank or a foot pedal to recharge the batteries on their laptop - for six minutes' [work], they get an hour of charge. That seemed like the ideal ratio to us." The plan is to bring affordable computing to school children in the developing world, chiming with the United Nation's aims of bridging the "digital divide" within the next decade.
A total of 1,000 laptops have been produced so far, with plans to ramp up production from thousands to millions within a few months. The $100 laptop uses flash memory rather than a hard drive - which Ms Jepsen described as "expensive, power-hungry and the leading cause of hardware failure in laptops". The other important factor in getting the price down, she said, was the screen - which in a normal laptop alone costs over $100.
"Radical new performance" had been achieved through a "re-think of the fundamental design of the screen," meaning that the cost of the screen for the $100 laptops is a third of the usual price.
It also takes a maximum of 14% of the power consumption, as well as being readable in sunlight, and has a high-resolution.
"And that is not very expensive - it really is cents per laptop to ship."
The One Laptop Per Child laptops, conceived and produced by a philanthropic group of designers and engineers led by Nicholas Negroponte - co-founder of the Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology - would begin arriving "within the next week," the project's chief technical officer, Mary Lou Jepsen, explained.She told that the design of the $100 laptop was highly innovative, centring on a CPU, or processor, that saves power by knowing when to turn itself off."The reason the CPU is usually on on a laptop is simply to refresh the screen, so in the timing controller chip for the display we put some memory - so when nothing's changing on the screen, it goes into self-refresh mode to save power," she explained.
"Half the kids in the world have little or no access to power, so it's been much harder to make a two-watt laptop."It's two watts because a kid can then use a crank or a foot pedal to recharge the batteries on their laptop - for six minutes' [work], they get an hour of charge. That seemed like the ideal ratio to us." The plan is to bring affordable computing to school children in the developing world, chiming with the United Nation's aims of bridging the "digital divide" within the next decade.
A total of 1,000 laptops have been produced so far, with plans to ramp up production from thousands to millions within a few months. The $100 laptop uses flash memory rather than a hard drive - which Ms Jepsen described as "expensive, power-hungry and the leading cause of hardware failure in laptops". The other important factor in getting the price down, she said, was the screen - which in a normal laptop alone costs over $100.
"Radical new performance" had been achieved through a "re-think of the fundamental design of the screen," meaning that the cost of the screen for the $100 laptops is a third of the usual price.
It also takes a maximum of 14% of the power consumption, as well as being readable in sunlight, and has a high-resolution.
"And that is not very expensive - it really is cents per laptop to ship."
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1 comment:
And yet, if that money being spent on the OLPC were spent on long term infrastructure... there would be less need for such things in the future.
$100 million is a lot of money for infrastructure. I'd rather have people build houses than live in shelters - and the OLPC is just a temporary shelter and a symptom of band-aid development.
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