One Laptop Per Child Talks

Mary Lou Jepsen of OLPC

On Thursday, April 26, One Laptop Per Child held a three-hour analyst meeting at their headquarters in Cambridge, MA. The OLPC Leadership spoke on several key aspects of the Children's Machine XO architecture and the program's overall production strategy.

OLPC Talks received exclusive audio tapes of the meeting, transcribed below. Please reference OLPC Talks if you use any quotes or information from the transcripts.

Mary Lou Jepsen, Chief Technology Officer, One Laptop Per Child:

There's some analysts here, so I thought - Well you might think this is a regular laptop – a regular laptop is for an office worker: It's got office productivity tools, multitasking, it's used indoors, and the power and network are accessible. Ours is completely different: Ours is designed to be used outside, with little or no access to the network – well we have access to the network but the mesh network is not in the last 10 km. And it's about information access and creation tools – those are our goals. And so the old rules for evaluating a laptop don't apply.

So you asked about cost: I can't actually tell you anything about cost, but basically the most expensive part is the motherboard and the chips on it. The mechanicals all together including the keyboard and the touchpad and some other things: about $30. The LCD, the battery, the WIFI, the camera – the videocamera in there, the incredible deal is about a dollar.

Questioner: (inaudible)

Mary Lou Jepsen: Sure

So all together it's right about $175, one key point: Our software cost is zero - $0, $3 is good too, but zero is better. And it's “Open” which means you can change it and improve it, and make it better... So it can give you this gross breakdown.

Questioner (male): When they all get to being distributed, will they all have the handcrank?

Mary Lou Jepsen: The handcrank is an accessory – you get to kind of choose what you want, for example, there is some levings (sic) here, this is about $12, 5 watts, plug it into your laptop, it's a solar panel, you can't break it, it's on stainless steel substrate, so if you live in the desert you might prefer that.

Questioner (male): Is that sufficient to power? That solar thing in bright light, it will power entirely?

Mary Lou Jepsen: Yeah, power your laptop. The Irgay (sic) have done extraordinary now on solar and alternative energy power solutions and I'll try to tell you a little about that.

Questioner: Is there standard software build that will come with the machines, obviously it can be customized, but are you moving a standard package?

Mary Lou Jepsen: I think each country will choose the specifics of the build on their machine but I'll let Walter talk about it. But obviously you'll want to choose a different operating system and I think we allow choice. Right now there are specific builds and they are changing everyday so we can try out the tools..

Questioner: But you're giving the menu for which to choose from, they can obviously add their own features...

Walter: We're providing a basic set of utility, that's standard build that comes with lots of features, like a security structure, update structure, and development tools, etc, etc

Questioner: Are you going to go into that over time?

Mary Lou Jepsen: We're not covering the software, we're covering the hardware.

So overall, this laptop, the motherboard is behind the screen, and it's a totally new architecture, and the big idea here was to create a really low-power laptop, to do that the big secret is to turn stuff off you're not using and it turns out RedHat helped us a lot they gave us the power consumption characteristics for the CPU in various different states. We had a big “A-Ha” when we looked at how much power consumption there was on your low power CPU...

(dropped something)

So it turns out it's taking about 3 watts to drive the display, right now my laptop is showing the same image over and over and over again. What's the CPU doing? Nothing, it's just updating the same image, 30 frames per second, until it drives another image, 30 fps, same data, why is the motherboard on?

So we scratched our head and thought, well, let's change that. So we designed a chip that allow the laptop to self-refresh the display and the WiFi functions separately, so that we can turn off large chunks of the motherboard most of the time. That defies conventional wisdom, Aren't the CPU the brains of the computer? Well yes, but they're power-hungry, so we're duty-cycling the motherboard a lot of the time. What that gives us, is an extremely low power laptop. The average power consumption of our laptop is 2-4 watts with that turned on. Peak Power for the sort of user “super-user” (power user, games machine mode, speakers blaring, everything going all the time) is 4-8 watts, but there is mass networking mode, we think it's off, it's about 1/2 a watt, which makes this thing last about 48 hours without a recharge. Ebook mode is about a watt.

So a new architecture which that you never actually have to shut off the laptop, it goes into a suspend mode – a hibernation mode, like you can all probably hibernate your laptops but how long does it take?

So we can turn it on and off without you noticing.

We decided 5 weeks ago and double the D-RAM in flash, and that board just arrived here at midnight and

Different Speaker: And I'll use that for my presentation.

Mary Lou Jepsen: The screen is 7.5 3x4 so it is more 30% more area than the last screen. It's 200 DPI which about 5 times the resolution of your screen which is 72 probably, why is 72 5x? Because it's X and Y.

The reason we went high resolution is part of the justification of the expenditure of government for book replacement. The number one reason we prefer to read on paper rather than on a screen, so it's stunningly higher resolution, color translucent mode is about 800x600 up to XGA and that is 1024x768, it's a smaller screen so the pixels are more dense.

The center area of the touchpad is touch-sensitive. Across the whole thing you can write so you can learn to write with a stylus, and that's the whole length of the screen – 6 inches.

Questioner: (Inaudible)

Mary Lou Jepsen: For a rabbit ear... You've got a built in camera and all these great features, and different modes of laptop – games machine mode...

These ideas... it's very rugged.

The Rabbit Ears are a key thing and Calis is in the room and he's our chief connectivity officer back there and he had an idea to working on the laptop particularly loss of the crank, what do we do, he had a great idea, have the antennas go up high than we could get 2-3 range, because we wouldn't have electronics blocking the signal.

Then Quanta said, oh we can use them as a latch, so it snaps tight and you can carry this in the pouring rain, very key.

The mesh operation is an amazing 0.4 watt WiFi mesh integration. It's astounding.

So there's high bandwidth between the X-Os and then there's backcalls to the Internet. One laptop's connected to the Internet, they all are and the speed of the Internet is based on the width of that one.

We're getting the quota of about 10cents per child, per month to have access.

The big thing that we've done is we've actually created the first outpouring into this laptop, we have this sunlight-readable screen, here I'm holding my laptop and our laptop in really bright sun...

The cost of this outside a lot of the time in the developing world, a regular laptop just won't work. I don't advise you to do this, but one of our engineers did some tests, in the keyboard section, with it on, 10 minutes works fine. And we've done a lot of drop testing, a lot of testing. We've been building this laptop for 18 months at Quanta. The average development time for a new laptop – a brand new laptop – is three months.

They are really very solid and ready to go.