100$ Laptop

MIT Media Lab's research initiative, to build a $100 laptop for students across the globe is chugging along, with Nicholas Negroponte, laboratory chairman and co-founder, MIT, to demonstrate a working prototype at the World Summit on the Information Society, the giant UN-sponsored gathering that starts Wednesday in Tunis.

According to reports, Steve Jobs had offered to provide free copies of OS X to the project, but his offer was turned down because OS X is not open source and the creators wanted an operating system where the source code is open and can be altered and tinkered with. Ironically, OS X is based on Unix which is open source.

Negroponte has said that this technology could revolutionize how we educate the world's children. The $100 machine will be a full-color, full-screen laptop that is Linux-based and running on AMD processors. The device is a stripped-down affair, with an electricity-generating crank and a swiveling seven-inch screen, for basic word-processing, Internet and communications. It has no hard drive, instead using flash memory like that in a digital camera. The processor, from AMD, runs at a pokey 500 megahertz. Each laptop will include a Wi-Fi radio transmitter designed to knit machines into a wireless "mesh" so they can share a Net connection, passing it from one computer to the next. Though there is a power cord, that cool crank can provide roughly ten minutes of juice for each minute of turning. But the key to chopping the price to $100 was the step towards reducing the cost of the screen. Negroponte's chief technology officer Mary Lou Jepsen, who used to work at Intel, has invented a display she thinks could be built for $35 or less (compared with the typical $100 or more).

These rugged laptops will be able to do almost everything, except store huge amounts of data. Five corporate sponsors; the likes of Google, AMD and Red Hat, have contributed $2 million each to the project.

Negroponte reportedly came up with the $100 laptop idea, after seeing children in a Cambodian village benefit from having notebook computers at school, which they could also take home and use. Negroponte has said that the laptop is a cost-effective alternative to hiring additional teachers, and is aimed at helping children teach themselves. As he puts it in an interview: "One laptop per child: Children are your most precious resource, and they can do a lot of self-learning and peer-to-peer teaching. Bingo. End of story."

Sun's Eco-Friendly Chip

Looking to leapfrog its rivals, today Sun Microsystems announced an “eco-friendly” server chip that it claims will deliver more performance while requiring less electricity than competing microprocessors. UltraSparc T1 processor, code-named Niagara, has eight computing engines on a single chip, with each core capable of handling up to four tasks at once, Sun said. It uses a 90-nanometer process and runs at 1.2 gigahertz (GHz), but Sun claims its performance matches that of 9.6 GHz chips.

It expects to ship systems based on the processor by December-end. The new chip uses an average 70 watts against the usual 150-200 watts required by server chips from Intel and IBM, Sun said. Sun is touting the chip as “eco-friendly.” It said removing the world’s web servers and replacing them with half the number of UltraSparc T1-based systems would have the same effect on carbon dioxide emissions as planting 1m trees.

“It’s time the technology industry took a stand tripling your datacenter performance shouldn’t mean tripling your power bill and needing more coal-fired plants,” said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s COO. If it lives up to the claims, the UltraSparc T1 could help Sun boost its traditional business of selling servers based on its own Sparc chips and Solaris operating system. It has been struggling since the high-tech bust of ‘00, as customers flocked to less expensive systems built with commodity Intel chips and less expensive or free software.

Sun claimed that the chip gives the company a five-year leap on IBM's 'Power' and Intel's 'Xeon' processors. "We have not had a performance advantage with Sparc in the past few years, but now we have an irrefutable performance advantage," he said. Details of how the Ultrasparc T1 will fit into Sun's server range are expected next month.