Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled
Submitted by srlinuxx on Tue, 11/03/2009 - 17:34
This morning I woke up to find an e-mail in my inbox which contained a link to an xeconomy.com interview with Nicholas Negroponte. While reading it over breakfast I managed to spill my tea because I couldn't believe I was really seeing the words I was looking at. XO-2 development canceled? An XO-1.75 to replace it? Talk about an XO-3? Going from OLPC to olpc? But let's take it step by step, shall we...
From XO-2 to XO-1.75 to XO-3
NN: 2.0 has been replaced by two things: 1) model 1.75, same industrial design but an ARM inside, 2) model 3.0, totally different industrial design, more like a sheet of paper.
Now there's something I didn't see coming! While I never believed that the XO-2 had gotten much beyond the concept stage I always considered it to be a strong vision of where OLPC was going in terms of device design. Sure, both the hardware and the software for an XO-2 are massive undertakings which would probably overstretch OLPC's limited resources but then again that's what everyone thought of the XO-1 design as well and arguably they did a great job there.
An ARM based XO-1.75 on the other hand is much more of an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary step into the future.
XO3 needs glass substrate for semiconductor production ?
Currently, with ion deposition process, semiconductor cmos transistors on glass can be made with SiO2 gates(ultra low core voltage).
It probably will take a year's time to make new computers with all glass construction. Glass is cheap and much cheaper than silicon substrates.
Thin film transistors are made on LCD Corning(expensive) glass to run the pixels brightness and contrast control.
So, it is just putting onw foot in front of the other to march onto glass chips with thin film cmos transistors.