$100 laptop
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This article or section contains information about scheduled or expected future product(s). It may contain information of a speculative nature and the content may change dramatically as the product release approaches and more information becomes available. |
| $100 laptop | |
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| Manufacturer | One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) / Quanta Computer |
| Type | Laptop |
| Connectivity | 802.11 internal with mesh networking |
| First available | Q1 2007 |
| Operating System | linux |
| Camera | USB plug-in option |
| Media | 256MB Flash memory / 128MB DRAM |
| Input | Keyboard / Touchpad/ 3 USB ports |
| Power | Batteries/Hand-crank generator / 12V car battery / AC wall |
| CPU | AMD Geode GX2 + 5536 |
| Display | dual-mode 7" diagonal TFT LCD (sunlight readable 200dpi) |
| Touchpad | extended length to allow learning to write |
The $100 laptop is a design for an inexpensive laptop computer intended to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education.
The computers will be rugged, Linux-based, and so energy efficient that hand-cranking alone will generate sufficient power for operation. Ad-hoc wireless mesh networking may be used to allow many machines Internet access from one connection. The pricing goal is to start at $100 and then steadily decrease. The laptops will be sold to governments and issued to children by schools on a basis of one laptop per child.
The laptop is being developed by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization. OLPC is a Delaware-based, non-profit organization created by faculty members of the MIT Media Lab to design, manufacture, and distribute the laptops. OLPC was announced by Lab chairman and co-founder Nicholas Negroponte at the January 2005 World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland.
The laptop is sometimes called the Green Machine.
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History
OLPC is based on "constructivist" theories of learning pioneered by Seymour Papert and later Alan Kay, Mitchel Resnick, and the principles expressed in Nicholas Negroponte's book Being Digital (ISBN 0679439196). The founding corporate members are Google, News Corp, AMD, Red Hat, and Brightstar, each of whom donated two million dollars to the project. All three individuals and five companies are active participants in OLPC. In many respects it is the descendant of the 1997 eMate (based on the Apple Newton), also aimed at the education market.
Negroponte showed a working prototype of the laptop on November 16, 2005 at the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis. However, the device shown was a rough prototype, as there is still work on the development of the device for both performance and price. Negroponte estimated that the screen alone required three more months of development. The laptops are scheduled to be be available by the end of 2006 or early 2007.
On December 14, Nortel announced it had become a corporate member of OLPC. [1]
At the 2006 World Economic Forum in Davos, the United Nations Development Program announced it would back the laptop. UNDP released a statement saying they would work with OLPC to deliver ""technology and resources to targeted schools in the least developed countries". [2]
On January 31, Red Hat announced it had become a corporate member of OLPC. [3]
Manufacturer
The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) board of directors announced on December 13, 2005 that Quanta Computers has been chosen as the original design manufacturer (ODM) for the $100 laptop project. The decision was made after the board reviewed bids from several possible manufacturing companies. The company emphasises that there is a lot of work that remains to be done: “We still need to put a large amount of research and development into this, and will then hopefully be ready to make a finished product in the second half of next year (2006)”, according to Quanta. Over the next six months, a team at Quanta Research Institute is going to be focusing on the $100 laptop. [4]
Participating countries
Brazil, Thailand, Egypt, United States (Massachusetts), Cambodia, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Tunisia, Argentina and Venezuela have already committed to the project in various ways. The laptops will be sold to governments, to be distributed through the ministries of education willing to adopt the policy of “one laptop per child”. In the U.S., Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has submitted a bill to the legislature to deliver $100 laptops to all children in the state.
While the OLPC originally planned to make the laptop available only through governments, Negroponte has indicated that they may partner with well known brand-name manufacturers to create a commercial version which would sell for about $225, that would subsidize units in the developing world.
Technology
The $100 Laptop will be a Linux-based, full-color, full-screen laptop. It will initially have a flat LCD screen, but in later generations may use electronic paper (for example E-ink developed at the MIT Media Lab). The laptop will be rugged, use innovative power (including a hand crank), be Wi-Fi- and VoIP-enabled and a touch screen (including a separate writing pad).
Design requirements
Mary Lou Jepsen stated the hardware design goals of this device as:
- minimum power consumption with a design target of 2 W to 3 W total power consumption
- minimum production cost with a target of $100 per laptop for production runs of one million units;
- a "cool" look, implying an innovative styling in its physical appearance
- eBook functionality with extremely low power consumption
- the software provided with the laptop be open source and free software
The software design requirements and the educational objectives have not been described publically.
Hardware
The hardware specifications, as of December 2005, with information from:
- the MIT Media Lab $100 laptop FAQ and
- a video interview with Mary Lou Jepsen on November 17, 2005 at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis
- a recording of a talk given by Nicholas Negroponte at the Technology Review's Fifth Annual Emerging Technologies Conference in September 2005.
Features
- A "special" 500-MHz CPU by AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) Inc with 0.25 W power consumption.
- SVGA 7.5″ diagonal transmissive and reflective liquid crystal display used in one of two modes:
- Transmissive Color/DVD mode with 350 by 470 pixel resolution with backlighting (for laptop use)
- Reflective "sunlight readable" monochrome mode with 800 by 600 pixel resolution (for ebook reading outdoors)
- 128 MB of DRAM
- 512 MB of flash memory
- Wireless networking using an "Extended Range" 802.11b wireless chipset run at a low bitrate (2 Mbps) to minimize power consumption.
- Conventional layout alphanumeric keyboard localized for the country of use.
- touchpad for mouse control and handwriting input
- two loudspeakers
- 4 USB ports.
- Power sources:
- AC Cord that doubles as carrying strap
- two C (R14) or D size rechargable batteries and a hand-crank generator
- four C (LR14) or D (LR20) alkaline batteries.
Intentionally omitted features
- no motor driven moving parts
- no hard disk drive
- no optical drive (e.g. CDROM or DVD drive)
- no floppy drive
- no IDE interface (as there are no drives to interface with)
- no PCMCIA card slot
Power consumption
The power consumption design target is 2 W to 3 W total power consumption for the device in "laptop" mode. Consumption in ebook mode is estimated to be be four to six times less.
The minimum acceptable crank time to operating time is 1:10, i.e. one minute of cranking the generator powers 10 minutes of operation. The hoped-for power consumption in "ebook" mode is 1:40 to 1:60, i.e. one minute of cranking powers 40 minutes to one hour of ebook reading. Until a complete working prototype is evaluated, these figures remain rough estimates.
In ebook mode, all hardware sub-systems are powered down except the monochrome display (including any display backlighting). When the user moves to a different page the system wakes up, draws the new page on the display and then goes back to sleep.
Display
The first-generation OLPC laptops are expected to have a novel low-cost TFT LCD display. Later generations of the OLPC laptop are expected to use low-cost, low-power and high-resolution eInk displays.
The TFT LCD display is the most expensive component of the OLPC Laptop. In April 2005, Negroponte hired Mary Lou Jepsen – who is expected to join the Media Arts and Sciences faculty at the MIT Media Lab in September 2006 – as OLPC Chief Technology Officer. Jepsen is developing a new display for the first-generation OLPC laptop, which is derived from the design of small LCD displays used in portable DVD players, which she estimated would cost about $35.
Jepson has described the removal of the filters that color the RGB subpixels as the critical design innovation in the new liquid crystal display. Instead of using subtractive color filters, the display uses a plastic diffraction grating and lenticular lenses on the rear of the LCD display to illuminate the colored subpixels. This grating pattern is stamped using the same technology used to make DVDs. The grating splits the light from the white backlight into a spectrum. The red, green and blue components are diffracted into the correct positions to illuminate the corresponding R, G or B subpixels. This innovation results in a much brighter display and a corresponding reduction in backlight illumination: While the color filters in a regular display typically absorb 80% of the light that hits them, this display absorbs little of that light.
The remainder of the LCD display uses existing display technology and can be made using existing manufacturing equipment. Even the masks can be made using combinations of existing materials and processes.
The display is transmissive with backlighting when used in color/DVD mode. The conventional cold cathode fluorescent lamp backlighting, which accounts for 30% of the cost of a conventional LCD, has been replaced with a lower-power, less fragile alternative such as white LEDs for use at low light levels. This form of backlighting should also improve the color gamut of the display.
The display is a reflective display (with no backlighting) when used in monochrome mode for displaying ebook pages.
It is unclear what mechanism is used to switch the display from monochrome to color/DVD mode. It is clear from the photographs at the OLPC web site that the mode change occurs with a change in use of the device. The landscape format color display is used in laptop mode, whereas the portrait format monochrome display in ebook mode, so the displayed pages can be "read vertically like a book". This is the so-called "curl-up-in-bed mode" to enable reading of ebooks for an extended time in bright light such as sunlight.
It is also unclear how the pixels in the 600-by-800 monochrome portrait display map to the color subpixels in the 470-by-350 color (or DVD) landscape display. Negroponte has said at the Technology Review's Fifth Annual Emerging Technologies Conference that the monochrome display has four times the resolution of the color display. In current TFT LCD displays, each RGB color pixel is composed of three one-third width subpixels of each color that are one pixel tall. But in this display, it seems likely that a four-pixel square block in monchrome mode becomes a single color pixel in color/DVD mode. The mapping of the four pixels to three colors might use a 2-by-2 square RG-GB sub-pixel arrangement like that of the Bayer filter used in Digital cameras to enhance the perceived brightness of the display. Perhaps two different green-hued subpixels are used to expand the display's color gamut. The display dimensions do not quite match up with the display dimensions given by Jepson, though one can see that 800 is close to twice 470 and 600 is close to twice 350. It is possible that this is the result of the current prototype using a current standard SVGA screen but the production version display may have 940-by-700 monochrome pixels.
The dual-mode display was not operational in the WSIS prototype. The prototypes were shown with conventional transmission TFT LCD displays.
The OLPC project has no plans to patent their display innovations.
Central processing unit
The architecture, processor name or model number for the laptop has not been specified. Advanced Micro Devices is a funding partner for the One Laptop Per Child project and is expected to provide the CPU for the laptop. Negroponte has repeatedly mentioned a 500-MHz AMD CPU in his talk and Jepson stated in a video interview that a "special 500-MHz CPU by AMD" with " 0.25 W power consumption" would be used as the CPU.
Many people have assumed that the CPU architecture must be compatible with the Intel x86 instruction set though this has not been confirmed by those associated with the project. If true the obvious candidate is the AMD Geode™ Processor Family™[5]. The 500-MHz AMD Geode LX 800@0.9W™ processor is the lowest power Geode CPU but it has typical power consumption of 1.6 W (and a maximum power of 2.4 W) at 500 MHz. Typical power consumption is six times higher than the target mentioned by Jepson and is close to the total power budget for the whole laptop. This CPU is built with 0.13-micron process. Even considering a process change which might bring the power down to 1.1 W for the same chip built on a 90-nm process chip or 0.8 W for a 65-nm process chip the chip seems not to be viable. It seems unlikley that this is the CPU under consideration.
A less obvious but perhaps more plausible candidate is the AMD Alchemy™ Processor Family. This processor family uses a MIPS architecture with a MIPS32™ Instruction Set. For example, the AMD Alchemy™ Au1100™ Processor seems to be a good candidate for this design. Power consumption for this processor is less than 200 mW at 333 MHz rising to 500 mW at 500MHz. Running at 400 MHz, it matches the power budget of 0.25 W mentioned by Jepson. In addition, this processor has idle and sleep power saving modes and pseudo-static design that enables the clock to be run at any rate down to DC to save power. This flexibility enables other power saving schemes to be implemented. In addition to the MIPS CPU core this system-on-a-chip also includes an on-chip LCD controller, a USB device and host controller, SDRAM and flash memory controller and several other controllers useful in a laptop design. All of these features would keep laptop cost low by both reducing the need for other components and reducing manufacturing costs. The AMD Alchemy™ Au1200™ Processor might be potential candidate providing both USB 2.0 Full Speed controllers and a DDR1/DDR2 RAM controller though these options might be more power intensive.
The final system-on-a-chip used may well be an addition to AMD's current products and might include the wireless network controller.
Wireless networking
IEEE 802.11b support will be provided using a Wi-Fi "Extended Range" chipset. Jepson has said the wireless chipset will be run at a low bitrate, 2 Mbps maximum rather than the usual higher speed 5.5 Mbps or 11 Mbps to minimize power consumption.
Whenever the laptop is powered on it will participate in a mobile ad-hoc network with each node operating in a peer-to-peer fashion with other laptops it can hear and forwarding packets across the cloud. If a computer in the cloud has access to the Internet (either directly or indirectly) then all computers in the cloud will be able to acess the net. The data rate across this network will not be high but similar networks like the store and forward Motoman project have supported email services to 1000 schoolchildren in Cambodia, according to Negroponte. The data rate should be sufficient for asynchronous network applications such as email to communicate outside the cloud rather than interactive uses, like web browsing, or high-bandwidth applications, such as video streaming. Interactive network communication should be possible inside the cloud.
The conventional IEEE 802.11 system only handles traffic within a local "cloud" of wireless devices in a manner similar to an Ethernet network. Each node transmits and receives its own data but does not route packets between two nodes that cannot communicate directly. Which additional protocols the OLPC laptop will use to form a wireless mesh network is not known.
It is unclear if the laptop will join the wireless mesh network if it is in eBook mode.
Keyboard and Touchpad
Negroponte and Jepson have said the keyboard will be changed to suit local needs to match the standard keyboard for the country in which it is used. Some versions of prototype was shown at WSIS with a detachable keyboard (tethered by a cord). Others had an attached keyboard that could be folded flat onto the back of the display. It is not clear if the detachable keyboard is part of the final design especially as some of the usage techniques described by Negroponte ("accordian-like" key use in eBook mode) seem at odds with a detachable keyboard.
Beneath the keyboard is a large dark area that resembles a very wide touchpad that Jepson refered to as the "mousepad". Negroponte has said that this device can be used for "calligraphy" presumably to support languages that use ideograms. This also implies that it will support both fingers and pen-like devices. This extended touchpad might also play a part in the "accordian-like" use in eBook mode for moving to the next and previous pages. The trackpad was not operational in the WSIS prototype.
Enclosure
The keyboard hinges around the battery/generator compartment to close on the display bezel surrounded by the carrying handle. Negroponte has said in the closed laptop the keyboard and display are hermetically sealed to prevent the ingress of dust and water.
Software
All of the software on the $100 Laptop will be open-source. The projected software as of November 2005 is:
- Red Hat Linux variant as operating system
- A web browser
- A word processor
- An email program
- A programming system, including the Squeak programming language
Steve Jobs had offered Mac OS X free of charge for use in the laptop, but according to Seymour Papert, a professor emeritus at MIT who is one of the initiative's founders, the designers want an operating system that can be tinkered with: "We declined because it's not open source"[6]. Therefore Linux was chosen. Microsoft's Bill Gates has attempted to convince Negroponte to use a version of Microsoft Windows on the laptop, but Negroponte turned him down. Some of Negroponte's friends told him Microsoft might then attempt to craft its own version of the laptop, but he responded such a development would be "great", as it would speed up the process of delivering cheap laptops.
Negroponte has also said he would like to see Wikipedia on the $100 laptop. Jimmy Wales, one of the cofounders of Wikipedia, feels that Wikipedia is one of the "killer apps" for this device[7]. A number of open-source textbooks need to be written in order for the $100 laptop to achieve its educational goals. Alternately, mainstream publishers may release electronic copyrights to their books at a low enough cost that non-open source textbooks could be used.
Criticism
Though generally well received at early stages, the project has been criticized as unrealistic.
At the UN conference in Tunisia, several African officials, most notably Marthe Dansokho of Cameroon and Mohammed Diop of Mali were suspicious of the motives of the project, and claimed that the project was using an overly American mindset that presented solutions not applicable to specifically African problems.
Dansokho said the project demonstrated misplaced priorities:
"African women who do most of the work in the countryside don't have time to sit with their children and research what crops they should be planting...What is needed is clean water and real schools." [8]
Diop specifically attacked the project as an attempt to exploit a new market under the guise of "non-profitability":
- It is a very clever marketing tool. Under the guise of non-profitability hundreds of millions of these laptops will be flogged off to our governments. That's the only way of achieving the necessary economies of scale to get the price low. They've finally found a way of selling to a huge number of poor people. [9]
On December 9, 2005, Intel Chairman Craig Barrett offered his criticism of the project:
- Mr Negroponte has called it a $100 laptop -- I think a more realistic title should be "the $100 gadget"... The problem is that gadgets have not been successful... It turns out what people are looking for is something that has the full functionality of a PC. Reprogrammable to run all the applications of a grown-up PC .... not dependent on servers in the sky to deliver content and capability to them, not dependent for hand cranks for power.[10]
Designs
Various use models are currently being explored by the MIT Media Lab with the help of Design Continuum, including: laptop, ebook, theatre, simulation, tote, and tablet architectures.
First-generation prototype
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Second-generation prototype
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Quotes
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- "Children will be able to learn by doing, not just through instruction — they will be able to open up new fronts for their education, particularly peer-to-peer learning." ―Kofi Annan.
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- "... if you take any world problem, any issue on the planet — the big ones, peace, the environment, poverty — the solution to that problem certainly includes education, could even be just education, and, if you have a solution that doesn't include education it's not a solution at all." ―Nicholas Negroponte.
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- "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." ―Nicholas Negroponte.
See also
- eMate 300, Apple Computer's attempt to make a flash-memory based laptop for the education market.
- Simputer is an earlier project to construct cheap handheld computers in India
Notes
- ^ "Nortel to Sponsor ''One Laptop per Child'' Initiative; Sponsorship Helps Bring Technology to Educate Children in Emerging Markets" Business Wire, accessed December 14, 2005.
- ^ "Red Hat Adds Muscle to One Laptop Per Child Movement" Red Hat, accessed February 1, 2006.
- ^ "$100 Laptop / OLPC (One Laptop Per Child)" Jim Gettys (MIT's Jim Gettys), accessed December 16, 2005.
- ^ "Quanta cool on contract for $100 laptops" Financial Times, accessed December 17, 2005.
- ^ "The $100 Laptop Moves Closer to Reality" WSJ, accessed December 1, 2005.
- ^ "User talk:Jimbo Wales" Wikipedia, accessed December 19, 2005.
- ^ "The $100 laptop — is it a wind-up?" CNN, accessed December 1, 2005.
- ^ "World's poorest don't want '$100 laptop': Intel" Reuters,], accessed February 2, 2006
- ^ "U.N. Lends Backing to the $100 Laptop" Associated Press, accessed January 27, 2006.
References
- Kirkpatrick, David. "I'd Like to Teach the World to Type". Fortune, pp. 37–38. November 28, 2005
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