An exclusive gaming industry community targeted
to, and designed for Professionals, Businesses
and Students in the sectors and industries
of Gaming, New Media and the Web, all closely
related with it's Business and Industry.
A Rich content driven service including articles,
contributed discussion, news, reviews, networking, downloads,
and debate.
We strive to cater for cultural influencers,
technology decision makers, early adopters and business leaders in the gaming industry.
A medium to share your or contribute your ideas,
experiences, questions and point of view or network
with other colleagues here at iVirtua Community.
It may have once dismissed the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) Project as a "cheap gadget," but Intel appears to have changed its mind. The company is now involved in talks to provide CPUs for the $100 (actually ~$175) systems.
According to the EETimes, Intel's newfound interest in the project is just fine with the OLPC design team. "Intel, like a lot of other people, is more than welcome to try to design great silicon for this project and this mission, and we've been working with them to help them do exactly that," said Walter Bender, OLPC's president.
Up until now, OLPC has been based on the AMD Geode, and it may be the functional weakness of that architecture that has Intel interested in capturing the OLPC market. As we mentioned earlier this year, the Geode is a less than ideal x86 architecture.
Quote:
The Geode LX-700 at the heart of the XO is a 433MHz chip whose design is based on the Cyrix MediaGX processor that debuted in 1997. With its 128K of L1 and 128K of L2 cache, support for DDR266, and its significantly faster clock speed, the LX-700 is obviously more powerful than the Cyrix 5x86 core on which it is based, but the heart of the CPU is still reliant on a non-superscalar architecture capable of executing only a single operation per clock cycle. Intel's Celeron M is inherently a more powerful CPU, though the lack of L2 cache in Intel's reference design will obviously impact performance.
In short, the OLPC XO is currently running on a CPU core that doesn't even qualify as a 5th-generation Pentium-class CPU. Intel, in contrast, is talking about building an OLPC system based around either modified Celeron processors or the upcoming dual-core Silverthorne, built on a 45nm process. The company seems to think it can do this in a cost-effective manner.
Digg Topic
Tag topic on On del.icio.us
Technorati Search
Post to Slashdot
