Podcast: Sparks fly between Intel and OLPC
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What's behind the fallout between Intel and the One Laptop Per Child program; News.com's Stephen Shankland talks with Red Hat's new CEO; and album sales drop in 2007.
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So I'm sitting in the rather vast &quot;press&quot; corner of a CES keynote audience, waiting to see Paul Otellini, President &amp; CEO of Intel, give a keynote. Two years ago I sat at an Otellini keynote here. As I reported in What's Intel up to with VIIV?, it was disappointing. Will this be different? Sure hope so.  read more
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roundup As chip engineers gather in San Francisco, Intel shows off its teraflop chops, and AMD talks pricing pressure and power consumption.
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Mary Lou Jepsen stirred up a controversy when she left the struggling One Laptop Per Child nonprofit effort in December to start her own for-profit company, Pixel Qi, with the goal to create a $75 laptop using technologies she invented at OLPC.Jepsen&#39;s departure as CTO prompted critics to accuse her of taking advantage of OLPC&#39;s nonprofit inventions for personal gain, but supporters shot back, saying it was the right time for her to leave a listing ship. OLPC has been afflicted by production delays and rising costs over years, with the laptop&#39;s estimated price rising from $100 to $188. It is now beset by waning orders and competition from commercial vendors like Intel that threaten to sideline the nonprofit effort.Jepsen denied the allegations, saying her departure was put in place early last year and that she continues to work with OLPC on developing technologies for future XO laptops while selling it for a profit to commercial organizations.Technologies she invented at OLPC include the display system optimized for low-power operation, which has been implemented in the XO laptop.Retaining the OLPC spirit, Jepsen said Pixel Qi is developing inexpensive products like a power-efficient display that can be used in developing countries. She chatted with the IDG News Service about the new company, the $75 laptop, and her days at OLPC.IDGNS: How is Pixel Qi progressing?Jepsen: Things are going great. Pixel Qi is now a month old. I&#39;ve done a lot of startups before, but [Pixel Qi] is a very unusual startup. It&#39;s got products to ship already, so that&#39;s unusual. It&#39;s getting a lot of attention, which surprises me, but it is good that people are interested.IDGNS: Are you working on the $75 laptop right now?Jepsen: The $75 laptop -- maybe people are interested in it because it&#39;s a catch phrase -- but mostly it&#39;s about designing things for the billions of people who are joining the information age right now. That&#39;s what Pixel Qi strongly believes in.Right now I&#39;m starting this company ... to get a lot of the technologies in [OLPC&#39;s XO] laptop into other laptops and cell phones as a first priority. Then working with OLPC to focus on driving that next-generation laptop. But we just started shipping this generation [of XO laptops], we owe it to ourselves to see how the children use them ... and before we start in earnest the design and development cycle to have the feedback from children in different countries.I&#39;m focused on getting the screens and power management into other people&#39;s small laptops and cell phones right now. I think the [$75 laptop] will happen pretty soon, but again, I&#39;m not really focused on the $75 laptop right now, while the innovations that I&#39;m working on can go into that.That mimics what we did at OLPC. We thought a lot about [designing the XO laptop] before executing on it. It&#39;s a lot easier to redesign on paper. [We are] taking this time and really talking to a lot of who&#39;s who in technology about what [the $75 laptop] should be. But it&#39;s certainly possible to go lower price -- if you look, there are $10 CPUs around.IDGNS: There is a perception that you left OLPC to privatize the technology and make money out of it.Jepsen: I arranged it with Nicholas [Negroponte]. My departure has been well planned and organized with OLPC. It was in place since spring of 2007, and I was committed to delivering the XO into high-volume mass production. But as somebody who ... invents, develops, and gets hardware into mass production, there wasn&#39;t much more for me to do at OLPC after ... that.On some level, I was responsible for making a laptop ... and, I realized ... I should keep doing this. So I got access to the ... intellectual property and patents. Not because I was the inventor, and not even because the inventor has the really good chance of improving the price and performance of her invention, but because OLPC is the beneficiary as the licensee.I&#39;m still in spirit with OLPC, but now I&#39;m with Pixel Qi, and I am not working on just children, but adults and trying to get the cost down. That doesn&#39;t mean just Dell on a diet if you will, but [a laptop] that people are proud to own and proud to use at low cost and designed for different environments. The mass market -- there&#39;s literally billions of people who want to join this information age, and they need products too. They need interesting products, not stripped-down stuff. The XO is probably the first in that line.IDGNS: A $75 computer seems optimistic considering OLPC&#39;s inability to produce a $100 laptop. Can you walk us through the changes needed in component prices and system design to reach that target?Jepsen: I don&#39;t think it&#39;s that hard, frankly. If you look at the cost of flash and DRAM, they go down 50 percent year over year. You look at screens, they go down 30 percent every year. If you look at the cost of CPUs -- well, some of them stay expensive -- there are several companies working on the $10 CPU right now.There are pretty low-cost [parts], but using low power, guess what ... you don&#39;t use the same amount of ... processing power. Your battery is really inexpensive if you don&#39;t use a lot of power because it won&#39;t need as many cells, for example. I think it&#39;s very straightforward.There&#39;s ways to hit ...[the $75] envelope if you look at the mechanicals and the keyboards and everything else you need on the motherboard. I think we know how to ... integrate the components and work with manufacturers and producers to get there very quickly to lowering the price and increasing the performance. But then again, you have to redefine performance for a cow herder and pick your country.IDGNS: All of that still calls for performance. Is there going to be some kind of trade-off in capabilities relative to a mainstream notebook?Jepsen: There&#39;s two ways to be fast, one is the standard, more blah way, where you just heap on the megahertz and megahertz and then heap on the code. Vista&#39;s footprint is 12GB as opposed to our OS at OLPC, it&#39;s 0.1GB, it&#39;s 120 times smaller. You could do big code and big iron or skinny down the code and make do with a 500 megahertz processor ... that was a state-of-the-art laptop in 2000. All of the software has gotten bloated, and do you really need a little paper clip guy or doggy telling you what to do?The XO is ... an outdoor usable laptop. You can drop it, you can spill on it and the batteries last a long time. And it&#39;s green. Those are performance metrics that really matter. Making your batteries last a week is also a performance criteria. Intel has said for a number of years that it&#39;s not about&#160;one more megahertz anymore, it&#39;s about lowering the power consumption.IDGNS: Are inexpensive laptops a new category? IDC says notebook computers like Eee PC -- they don&#39;t take those laptops when they measure market share or measure unit shipments. They&#39;re calling the category &quot;notebook gadgets.&quot; How do you feel about that?Jepsen: It&#39;s funny. I don&#39;t feel much about the word. I just talked at a gadget conference, &quot;Greener Gadgets,&quot; but ... [Intel&#39;s] Craig Barrett, when he was trying to be derogatory toward the laptop project, called it a gadget. I think that we think of gadgets as things that don&#39;t really work for long, have a short life, and are transient, not real machines. The XO lasts two-and-a-half times longer than a standard laptop. That&#39;s not a gadget-like property of it. What is a gadget? Is it a learning machine or is your laptop a gadget or cell phone a gadget?IDGNS: Did Intel undermine the OLPC project with their Classmate PC?Jepsen: It&#39;s such a long story with them, especially for me because I used to work [at Intel]. It&#39;s hard for me to summarize. Certainly, there are so many individuals at that company on the technical side when we finally got working together, it was great. We were really pursuing an -- I think it&#39;s been announced -- Intel chip in the XO, that was something we were working well together on with their technical team. I think the difficulty was from the sales and marketing side as I understand it, and I really wasn&#39;t involved in that in OLPC. I would only hear from the ministers in the countries I would visit and from Nicholas and so forth. I wasn&#39;t that involved in it towards the end.IDGNS: Is there a release date for the $75 laptop?Jepsen: It&#39;s not that hard. It will take about two years. Realistically, it does need that time because what you have to do first is make the components and then you put them together. At OLPC, it took&#160;three years because we had to start with the disbelief, but now people believe. Now cut that down to about two years, it&#39;s about reasonable. It&#39;s 2010 we&#39;re looking at.
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(InfoWorld) - Discussions are under way to put an Intel microprocessor inside a version of theÂ One Laptop Per ChildÂ (OLPC) project's "$100 laptop" for children in developing countries, according to representatives from both parties. "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, in a telephone interview. Despite its nickname, the OLPC's lime-green XO laptop actually costs $175. The first version of the machine runs on Advanced Micro Devices' 433MHz Geode LX-700, an x86-architecture chip that is slow by the standard of mainstream processors but consumes little power and costs less. OLPC is close to starting productionÂ of the XO. The group has already gone through four generations of test systems to refine the laptop's design. A production run of 300 machines was completed in August, a final preparatory step before the XO goes into mass production later this month or in early October. While OLPC has yet to decide whether or not to use Intel processors, Intel confirmed its engineers are developing a motherboard based on one of its chips for an OLPC laptop. That process required the engineers to start from scratch, since the current XO design isn't based on Intel's chips. "It requires a new design, a new product," said Leighton Phillips, the manager of Intel's World Ahead Program in Asia. The design, which Intel plans to submit for OLPC's consideration, will be based on either existing mobile chips, such as modified versions of the Celeron M called A100 and A110, or Silverthorne, an upcoming processor designed for small, mobile computers. The dual-coreÂ Silverthorne processorÂ will be made using a 45-nanometer production process and will be available early next year in different versions. Silverthorne's main advantages are lower power consumption and size. The chips are so small that Intel can fit 2,500 of them on a single 300-millimeter silicon wafer, helping to keep unit production costs low enough for them to be used in handheld devices and low-cost computers. Whether Silverthorne is cheap enough to be used in laptops like the XO remains to be seen. "We're looking at ways to get there," Phillips said. If an Intel chip ends up inside an OLPC laptop, the laptop may be different from the existing XO design. That laptop was designed for use in harsh, rural environments with lots of dust and high humidity, but OLPC wants to develop laptops for use in urban areas where better infrastructure is available. "I can imagine there will be a family of laptops in terms of processor power and maybe there will be a larger form factor for older kids," Bender said. The discussions over an Intel-based laptop are part of wider talks on how Intel and OLPC can cooperate on technology and product development. Those talks started in July after Intel and OLPC signed an agreement that, among other things, gave Intel a seat on the group's board and prevents the two sides from disparaging each others' products. Besides putting an Intel processor inside a future OLPC laptop, the talks could see some of the technology developed by OLPC find its way into Intel's hands. For example, the chip maker is interested in the low-power screen technology developed by OLPC. Offering an OLPC laptop with an Intel processor doesn't mean the group will stop using AMD's chips, Bender said. "The Geode's been very easy to work with and hasn't been a limiting factor whatsoever," he said. As part of OLPC's desire to offer systems based on different processors, the group is looking to work with other vendors, in addition to Intel. One such company is Marvell Technology Group, which could see its Xscale processors, which the company acquired from Intel in 2006, also end up in future OLPC laptops, Bender said. "We want to have lots of choices, lots of people doing this, because there are lots of kids and lots of need," he said.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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At ISSCC next week, Intel will reveal details on a new CPU that sounds like Silverthorne--but execs won't confirm.
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InfoWorld - In an unexpected development, chip giant Intel has joined the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. The nonprofit project aims to equip children in developing countries with specially designed low-cost notebooks powered by chips from Intel rival&#160;AMD.
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This week, chip giant Intel is hosting its twice-a-year Intel Developer Forum, where PC hardware and software developers will hear the company&#39;s plans for future products.
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Dell and Intel have danced this dance before, only this time the tune has changed. &quot;Historically Dell has done this because they aren&#39;t getting the response they want from Intel and then Intel
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Chipmaking giant Intel Corporation believes that its future lies in dual-core chips. Speaking at last weekâs Intel Developer Forum here, Intel President and COO Paul Otellini
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Dr. Bill Worley -- co-developer of the architecture that led to the Itanium 2 family of microprocessors, and co-founder and CTO of Secure64 -- is scheduled to speak at the Fall 2006 Intel Developer Forum (IDF), which takes place September 26-28th. Dr.
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By Bloomberg, AP and Staff Reports  Video:  Intel to Cut 10,500 Positions    Video:  Intel Shakeup Has Oregon Community Concerned    Chip-maker Intel Corp.
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InfoWorld - Discussions are under way to put an Intel microprocessor inside a version of the&#160;One Laptop Per Child&#160;(OLPC) project&#39;s &quot;$100 laptop&quot; for children in developing countries, according to representatives from both parties.
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No hard feelings. Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) has hired away hundreds of engineers from Hewlett-Packard (nyse: HPQ - news - people ). However, it is unlikely to cause friction between the chipmaker
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Intel researcher Jerry Bautista defends the practicality of the massively multi-core chips that his company is working on. He makes the case that these chips could help make 3-D worlds like Second Life look far more realistic.
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Plus, Intel's still straining, revenge of the nerds, and a $13 billion Christmas present?