Intel withdraws support of OLPC program

Intel has announced that it will withdraw from the One Laptop Per Child project.

The company citied “philosophical” differences as the reason it is withdrawing from the project, which endeavours to provide a laptop for every child in poor nations.

The OLPC computer is designed to be cheap to produce and is nicknames “the $100 laptop” despite costing more than the originally intended, $100.

The general idea was that costs of production would be kept low if nations ordered the computers by the million but orders of this magnitude have yet to materialise.

Intel began funding the OLPC project in July last year despite the use of AMD chips in the first OLPC computers.

According to the BBC, a spokesman for Intel said that the use of AMD chips had nothing to do with the company’s withdrawal from the board and funding. He said that OLPC had asked Intel to stop backing rival low-cost computers including the company’s own Classmate PC.