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OLPC Gets $5.6M Grant To Develop Tablet With Marvell
tugfoigel writes "According to Xconomy, 'The One Laptop per Child Foundation and Santa Clara, CA-based semiconductor maker Marvell have cemented a partnership announced last spring, with Marvell agreeing to provide OLPC with $5.6 million to fund development of its next generation tablet computer. Nicholas Negroponte says the deal, signed in the past week or so but not previously announced, runs through 2011. "Their money is a grant to the OLPC Foundation to develop a tablet or tablets based on their chip," he says. The OLPC tablet ... is known as the XO 3 because it represents the third-generation of the XO laptop currently sold by OLPC (the foundation scrapped plans for its e-book-like XO 2 computer and is moving straight to the tablet). ... The deal, he says, means the tablet's development is "fully funded."'"
Anyone else disappointed it wasn't a Marvel comics themed OLPC :)
The OLPC project went nowhere. They took money and work from the community, then they sold themselves to microsoft, and achieved none of all their goals. The project went nowhere.
There are already awesome tablets like the aPad that exist right now and retail for less than 200 dollars. I'm sure you could drive them below 100 if you built enough and bought them altogether.
Why are we still listening to the OLPC's pipe dreams about developing hardware? They already proved that they can't get anything done, and that they will sell out if necessary. Want to do something? The product you want is already out there. Buy it, drive its price down, and start delivering.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
When you are satisfying consumer demand, is it caving?
The good news is that the Marvel chip won't support Windows.
The bad news is that the child with an OLPC while she may learn to do art on her computer, won't learn to do anything helpful in any labor market on earth. With a tablet, she won't even learn to touch type. I know that the project wants to prepare her for more self-actualizing career, such as poet, designer, president or CIO, very few will have that opportunity if they can't get an entry level job in the urban sector.
Depends on your point of view. From the point of view of their (ex) development community, most of whom walked away when they fastened on to the Microsoft's teat, yup, they caved like a nun bluffing on a pair of nines.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I will admit off the bat that my info is about 9 months old, and I know that Marvell was working on fixing the main problem of their SoC, namely it's 16 bit bus width. While the core itself is really fast (I'm sure you've been shown the raw performance metrics), the limited memory bandwidth means that the CPU is idling most of the time waiting for instructions to cache. Once they are cached, as in most "core benchmarks", it turns out performance at almost Atom speeds.
Marvell had a specific niche market in mind when it built the chip, but that market hasn't really taken off. They are trying to shop it around to find other markets it might stick, but as a general purpose chip it can't hold its own against the low end of the market on price or the high end on performance.
For what it was designed for (on the fly image processing and display), it is really great. The image coprocessor and video pipeline is much better than the i.MX5x's, but if you ran actual OS benchmarks, you'd see Marvell lose their advantage pretty quickly. In an industrial setting, Freescale has the advantage since their main focus is on markets where ruggedization is required.
It could be different now. They should have revved the chip at least twice by now, so the above could be all old info.
Did you miss the part where they put out 1.5 million laptops?
Yeah, a $100 target would have been better. Twice as good in fact.
Sticking strictly with open and free is debatable. If they can wheedle a few million out of MS in exchange for some empty promices, so much the better.
The product that they want IS the XO. It has a lot of nice features that other cheap laptops don't.
Do they really need a tablet version? Shrug, I dunno. But to say that the OLPC project went nowhere is a bold faced lie. Just because you don't see them in walmart doesn't mean much. (but yeah, I'd like to see them in retail too.)
Heck yeah. The OLPC guys came out with a neato box for $200, and you had to buy one buy buying two (on for you, one for a kid). They missed their mark by something like a factor of two, but definitely came up with a bunch of good ideas for an educational device, and a cheap one, at that.
Sure they'll miss the mark on this one, too. But it'll still push the industry downward. It won't take much innovation to get prices even lower, but it will take some. OLPC will provide some of that.
In this case, it wasn't "consumers" who wanted Windows on the XO, it was Microsoft and their local lobbyists.
Windows is a maintenance nightmare. These kids would end up as part of a botnet faster than you can say Ballmer.