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ARM Powered OLPC XO-1.75 Laptop Is Faster Than X86
Charbax writes "Not only is power consumption halved to less than two Watts and price of the motherboard reduced, the performance of the next generation OLPC Laptop is actually better for running full Fedora Linux compared to x86. Here's a video interviewing OLPC's CTO, Edward J. McNierney, where he explains how and why OLPC's world class engineers are making this change of CPU architecture. If OLPC XO-1 threatened Intel enough to start the netbook market and has reached two million poor kids in third-world countries thus far, XO-1.75 may help start the ARM-powered Linux laptop market. Do you think Fedora/Sugar will do, or should OLPC attract Chrome OS and Android solutions for education to get faster help from the big boys of Silicon Valley in bringing Linux software successfully to the next billion PC/laptop users?"
The $100 has always been target that can only be reached once more than 6 million units are mass manufactured, that was always the original idea. Intel tactics though, it has been proven in official state letters, successfully blocked OLPC from reaching countries like Nigeria, China, India, etc. But even though they "only" sold 2 million laptops to children in some of the poorest places in the world, you can find plenty videos online http://olpc.tv/ , see how the kids and teachers are using those daily, it's a huge success. I mean comon, OLPC may have deeply changed the lives of 2 million families in more or less very poor third world countries. Sure enough, it'd be better they reached 2 billion kids by now, by they I mean OLPC or anyone else in the industry. It's all about lowering cost and lowering power consumption of laptops and also bringing internet everywhere.
As I've watched Android dominate the tablet market, I'm bothered by the fact that these devices do not give root access without "jailbreaking". Isn't Android a major step toward the very scary world of "Trusted Computing"? That is, the hardware manufacturer, government, or whoever else has power can deny the ability for a user to run a program (or all programs!) at whim. Right out of the box, the user is denied permission to use their hardware in the way that they see fit.
I feel much more comfortable with a full Linux distro that empowers its users, rather than makes them comfortable with someone else holding the keys to their machine. Besided, android hardly seems compatible with the "open" goals of OLPC. A full distro would take advantage of a real JVM and a much richer software eco-structure instead.