One Laptop Per Child started off with its XO-1 budget laptop which was hyped as the $100 computer. Alas OLPC didn’t manage to deliver but the price was still low enough to ship XO-1 PCs to developing countries where the spread of IT and computer knowledge was limited due to the cost of the technology. That the price is important is hardly an overstatement and OLPC has now found a new way of cutting costs of the next model, XO-2, while improving the battery time.
It has more or less decided to dump the x86 architecture in favor of the all the more popular ARM architecture. The XO-1 model of today consumes as little as 5W and even if this may seem low it is still too high for OLPC’s demands.
The XO-1 sports an AMD-made Geode processor under the hood and even if other x86-based processors may offer lower power consumption ARM is still far ahead there.
The problem is that this excludes any possibility of a Windows-based XO-2 machine, something OLPC would like to avoid. It is therefore pressuring Microsoft to launch an ARM-compatible version of Windows. Microsoft isn’t exactly thrilled about the thought but it hasn’t turned it down completely either.
“However, the Arm chip could lead to problems for XO-2 in trying to load a full version of Windows, Negroponte said. As with the XO-1, OLPC wants to offer a dual-boot option on XO-2 where users can choose to load either Linux or a full Windows OS. While Arm processors can run Windows Mobile operating systems, they can’t run a full Windows OS.”
In 18 months OLPC XO-2 will be ready for market so there is still plenty of time for Microsoft to get that ARM support for Windows. Whether it will actually happen or not is a different story though.
OLPC XO-2 design concept
Whatever Microsoft might do it is becoming quite clear that one of the world’s cheapest computers will be ARM-based in the future.
