OLPC Gets $5.6M Grant To Develop Tablet With Marvell 100
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."'"
Re:And we need this why? (Score:3, Informative)
I used an OLPC for the first time at a free software event in Melbourne a couple of weeks ago, The units they had were on loan from a school. It is a fantastic machine. Very rugged and attractive to children. I would probably prefer a stock ubuntu install instead of using the sugar UI, but the hardware is open so you can do that.
I think its a shame more people didn't get an opportunity to buy them.
Re:Details? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:And we need this why? (Score:4, Informative)
Lots of people had an opportunity to buy them. "Buy one Give one", for example.
The problem was OLPC was vaporware, at least as far as being able to provide the "buy one" that I tried to buy. They charged my credit card the day I ordered, then tried dragging the delivery date out until after the time limit for contesting the charge. They lied to me about delivery dates about three times, claiming they had them in stock one day, then two days later admitting they'd been out of stock for a month.
I'd have cut them a lot of slack if they'd been honest about being able to provide what they charged me for, and didn't charge me until it shipped, but they shot themselves in both feet the way they did things.
If they've gotten their act together now, good for them. Once burned, twice shy.