LWN: Comments on "Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled (OLPC News)"

Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled (OLPC News)

nix — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:10:19 +0000

Yeah, it was only one batch of Spectrums that had the problem, where they
switched to individual dead-flesh keys attached to the machine via glue.
Unfortunately the glue melted in the heat, so if the machines got warm
(because you used them, or they were sitting in a hot storefront all day)
the keys would fall off. They became rather infamous for this :)

Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled (OLPC News)

Tet — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:35:22 +0000

Squishy Dead Meat was the Spectrum (the one whose keys fell off if you turned it over and hit it hard).

Errrr.... no. That might have been true of later Spectrums, but the original models (the ones that people accused of feeling like dead flesh) have all the keys as a single sheet of rubber poking through holes in the sheet metal front, so it simply wasn't possible for the keys to fall off. That said, quite why anyone would try turning it upside down and hitting it is beyond me right now anyway...

Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled (OLPC News)

nye — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:22:00 +0000

>even Z80 arch itself is still in use somewhere, I believe.

Quite widely I think (relatively speaking), though usually it's actually a pin-compatible replacement, with improvements such as the capability for higher clock speeds.

A couple of my university courses (I graduated a couple of years ago) were based around the Hitachi H180, which is basically a Z80 on steroids (though not a lot of steroids :P).

Those modules would have been a *lot* easier if we'd had them *after* the introduction to compiler design, and some software engineering process, rather than just before. I hope I never again have to burn another EPROM in my life.

Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled (OLPC News)

ikm — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:27:05 +0000

I thought about bringing up the same thing. Though nowadays platforms where all that is applicable still exist -- and even Z80 arch itself is still in use somewhere, I believe.

But my feeling is that life was much more simple there, really. I mean, it's much easier to figure what you can do with 1K than what you can do with 1GB :) That's why modern computing is stuck wasting resources. A lot of inventions nowadays seem to be aimed precisely at wasting them more wastefully (by that I mean Java, Python etc). Other than that, not much groundbreaking's going on.

Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled (OLPC News)

nix — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:57:45 +0000

*Real* programming is figuring out how to do anything useful in 1K RAM
because the RAMpack is too wobbly to use for anything practical. :)

(and now I have tens of millions of times as much RAM. Can the machine
*do* tens of millions of times as much? Not really.)

Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled (OLPC News)

sdalley — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:48:05 +0000

Ah, so it was. Good to get these little details right.

What is programming, after all, except details?

;)

Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled (OLPC News)

nix — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:53:32 +0000

Squishy Dead Meat was the Spectrum (the one whose keys fell off if you
turned it over and hit it hard). The ZX81 was the one with the completely
flat touch-sensitive keyboard with no feedback whatever (except a faint
feeling of a switch clicking if you tried hard enough).

Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled (OLPC News)

sdalley — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:10:45 +0000

Ahh, yes. The Squishy Dead Meat experience ...

Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled (OLPC News)

nix — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:16:35 +0000

Imagine? What short memories they have. I can remember the ZX81, yes,
thanks, and the keyboard was (in hindsight) really quite nasty.

Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled (OLPC News)

daniels — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:38:30 +0000

Err, that's what haptics are for ...

no MS, or at least an advantage for free software

coriordan — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:17:40 +0000

Hopefully Microsoft won't have ported Windows to Arm chips by then.

But even if they have, free software still has an advantage because once software makes it into the distros, it'll be compiled for whatever platforms that distro supports.

With proprietary software, compilation has to be done by the proprietor, so whether or not the full range of MS Windows software is available for a new platform depends on all application developers compiling for each platform.

Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled (OLPC News)

robert_s — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:27:32 +0000

"We heard all about the haptic dual-display no-keyboard OLPC 2. Really nice design if you considered that it was just a concept and would never be built."

Well thank god. Can you imagine typing on a keyboard where you can't feel the keys? Touchscreen phones are bad enough.

Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled (OLPC News)

robert_s — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:42:39 +0000

"Negroponte seems to imply that 1.75 would be like 2.0 with ARM CPU:
> 2.0 has been replaced by two things: 1) model 1.75, same industrial design but an ARM inside "

Yes, same industrial design _as the XO-1_.

Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled (OLPC News)

ebiederm — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:14:29 +0000

Lookup systems on a chip for both ARM and x86 and the difference in the platforms for making something low cost, and low power becomes much clearer.

Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled (OLPC News)

epa — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:31:59 +0000

There's very little porting to do - Fedora already runs on ARM (as a secondary architecture) and the Sugar stuff is in compiled or high-level languages. Only device drivers would need some work.

ARM

man_ls — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:41:48 +0000

No reason. It seems that he is not following the race closely enough though; ARM processors still trounce everything x86 has to offer. There are no x86 processors in smartphones, for instance.

Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled (OLPC News)

jordanb — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:46:35 +0000

> Will it be like XO-2?

You mean, is it a dumb idea that will be widely panned when actual specs come out, and then abandoned a few months later by a Negroponte trumpeting a "XO-4", never having coming anywhere close to actually producing even a prototype model of the XO-3?

Probably.

Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled (OLPC News)

wmf — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:26:25 +0000

The XO 1.5 has already been released, so an improved version couldn't be called 1.25.

I don't think kids will be overly concerned with exactly which hardware revision they get.

Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled (OLPC News)

proski — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:00:45 +0000

Negroponte seems to imply that 1.75 would be like 2.0 with ARM CPU:

2.0 has been replaced by two things: 1) model 1.75, same industrial design but an ARM inside

but the editor's comment gives a different interpretation:

By "model 1.75," Negroponte is referring to an upgraded version of the current green-and-white XO laptop with a different processor inside

I guess it's more like 1.25 then. By the way, I would avoid using decimal point in the version number of something that is going to be used internationally, especially by the schoolchildren.

Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled (OLPC News)

wmf — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:42:48 +0000

He's an outside observer, not an OLPC developer.

Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled (OLPC News)

intgr — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:10:43 +0000

I've been following the ongoing x86 vs. ARM race quite closely and it's my understanding that they're now closely matched when it comes to the all-important price / performance / power-consumption metrics.

If I understand this right, he's saying that there is no big difference between x86 and ARM in the three criteria. So why bother investing time and money into porting XO software to ARM if it reportedly doesn't make a big difference?

Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled (OLPC News)

BrucePerens — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:41:31 +0000

Well, take everything you hear with a chunk of salt. We heard all about the haptic dual-display no-keyboard OLPC 2. Really nice design if you considered that it was just a concept and would never be built. Now obviously electric paper is the way to go because it cranks down the power consumption, and an e-book rather than laptop paradigm is closer to what the kids really need - which is a vehicle for cheap textbooks.

But the real question here is whether they can make anything any longer. I'm really glad that Sugar Labs is off to one side where they don't have to get caught up in Nick's direction de jour. I suspect that the most concrete continuing output from the laptop project will come from them.

Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled (OLPC News)

ikm — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:27:44 +0000

It's the first time I hear about XO-3. Is any information about it available? Will it be like XO-2?