$100 laptop 'coming soon'

The chief technology officer on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project said today that the organisation is on track to deliver its US$100 laptop by next spring.

Dr Mary Lou Jepsen described the OLPC programme in Working on the US$100 Laptop in the July issue of IEEE-USA Today's Engineer Online.

Dr Jepsen wrote that Billy Edwards, chief strategy officer at AMD, described OLPCs laptop design as the first fundamental revisit of personal computer architecture since IBM launched the PC in 1981.

"Twenty-five years, and now, for the first time, we're redesigning the whole architecture - hardware, software, display - and we're coming up with some remarkable inventions and innovations," he said.

The US$100 laptop, which requires no boot-up time, features a Wi-Fi antennae operating at three to four times the usual range, a hand crank to recharge the battery and a higher resolution display.

It uses one-tenth the power consumption of a normal laptop.

"This is not a cost-reduced version of today's laptops," Jepsen wrote. "It's an entirely new approach to the idea of a laptop."

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