The OLPC laptop: fairly powerful hardware, actually.
Today I was reading an article about the One Laptop per Child project. It suggested that Linux was not a suitable OS to use on such systems. Now, I don’t know whether that is true or not. I’m more interested in what was said in this portion of the post: Don’t get me wrong - I know that stuffing a full version of Windows or OS X on one of these machines is difficult due to the hardware that’s contained within, but with that said, light embedded versions of these products could have been a possibility, and Steve Jobs even offered OLPC free usage of OS X on the laptop!
I wasn’t sure exactly what the specs were on these laptops, so I went to the OLPC wiki and checked their hardware specifications page. I have to say, I was quite surprised. These are rather powerful systems. The CPU is apparently a 433 MHz AMD Geode LX-700, and the laptops contain 256 MB of RAM.
Now, I realize that such a 433 MHz CPU would appear quite inferior to the latest x86-64 chips from AMD and Intel. Likewise, with many consumer-grade desktops including 1 GB of RAM or more, 256 MB doesn’t seem like a lot. But we also shouldn’t forget that these OLPC systems are comparable to the high-end PC systems of not even a decade ago.
I recall being amazed at how powerful PC hardware was getting by the late 1990s. At one particular job, I remember replacing several old SGI servers with a single new PC server running Linux, offering approximately the same hardware specs as these laptops. The performance boost that we experienced was significant. It was more than we had been anticipating. I was last at that company about six months ago, and that very server was still being used for its original purpose. The only changes were some software security fixes.
Hardware of the calibre found in the OLPC laptop is still very capable. So I find it absurd to suggest that the possible inability to use Windows or Mac OS X on such systems has anything to do with the hardware; it doesn’t. The only real reason a system like Windows or Mac OS X would not work on such hardware is due to software bloat.
When it comes to Mac OS X in particular, we should remember that it is directly derived from NeXTSTEP. Years back I used a NeXTstation, and I was very surprised at how performant it was. These were systems with, at the high end, a 33 MHz Motorola 68040 CPU, and usually 8 or 12 MB of RAM. That’s a mere fraction of what is available in these laptops. Yet NeXT still managed to put out a well-performing and very functional system using essentially the exact same software development technology still being used today on Mac OS X. If Objective-C, C and C++-based software ran enjoyably on those NeXT systems, which had 32 times less RAM and CPUs running at 1/13th the frequency of that of the OLPC laptops, the problems the author mentions involving Mac OS X should not exist.