A marriage of convenience broken: OLPC and Intel

Quoting: it was idealism vs. pragmatism...

I think people get this wrong all the time, like calling RMS an idealist and Linus a pragmatist. To me, freedom is most pragmatic philosophy of all, and anything that undercuts it is not pragmatic, but expedient. Same goes for OLPC vs. The Poor Starving Tech Billionaires. What could be more pragmatic than developing and distributing a rugged, ingenious learning tool into the hands of people who are currently left out of the tech revolution? It has the potential to greatly expand the customer bases of TPSTBs, as well as develop a whole new pool of potential engineers and developers. Intel's ridiculous antics are not pragmatic at all; they are ridiculous and shameful, and do not benefit Intel at all. But the success of OLPC could benefit Intel and the other PSTBs greatly, if only they were not too stupid and greedy to see it.

TC, stop being so kind, just tell us what you really feel.

Just say no no no no. No Intel No m$

Why did OLPC go with AMD over Intel to begin with? Did AMD have a better low-power product?

>Why did OLPC go with AMD over Intel to begin with? Did AMD have a better low-power product?

No idea, but, when shopping around to construct my myth frontend, I discovered that the combo low power/bang for buck segment is all but owned by AMD -- unless you want to go all the way to Via, which is REALLY low power.

Via... oh yeah...... that's how Cyrix makes a comeback..........

Probably, they were more interested in the opportunity since they're smaller, and IIRC AMD did a cheaper offering; i.e. their products were cheaper, as needed for a 'cheap laptop'.

@Steven: IIRC from the groklaw interview, AMD's chip could run with less power and switch between power modes much faster than the comparable Intel chip.