At this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which just came to an end in Las Vegas, the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) Project confirmed that it's upcoming XO-1.75 laptop only requires two watts (2W) of power – previous models use about 5 watts. Discussing power consumption, OLPC CTO Edward McNierney said, "The biggest obstacle has been power," noting that, "We are pretty excited about getting a lower power laptop out there".



The XO-1, XO-1.5 and XO-1.75 look the same on the outside, but differ on the inside.

Source: OLPC Based on the same industrial design as the XO-1 and XO-1.5 laptops, the XO-1.75 can also be powered by a hand crank when the battery is running low as an alternative to plugging it in – McNierney says that it would take approximately two hours of cranking to charge the laptop fully. Unlike the the XO-1 which used an x86 Geode chip from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and the XO-1.5 that used a VIA C7-M processor with clock ranges from 400MHz to 1GHz, the XO-1.75 is powered by a 1 GHz ARM processor, and uses the Armada 610 chip from Marvell. Otherwise, the new model is identical to the previous versions in almost every way, including the amount of memory, storage options, the display size and the included software, the Sugar Learning Platform. The XO-1.75 is expected to start shipping in the second quarter (Q2) of this year.

Following the XO-1.75, the XO-3 will be a major re-design that will be a minimalist tablet featuring an 8.5 by 11 inch touch screen (the size of US letter paper), a virtual keyboard and a camera on the back. According to Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC’s founder and chairman, the Marvell-powered XO-3 is targeted for release in 2012 and should require approximately one watt (1 W) of power.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is a non-profit organisation who's mission is to provide children across the world with low cost laptops for the purposes of self-education.

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(crve)