An extraordinary row has broken out between Nicholas Negroponte, who heads up the Media Labs at MIT and Intel.
Negroponte has had a long-running scheme to make a laptop so cheap that every child in the world can have one.
At the moment, his prototypes cost $176 but, he hopes, that can come down to $100 when it moves into volume production. For that he needs orders above three million units.
However his OLPC (one laptop per child) device is not reaching volume sales quickly enough because, says Negroponte, Intel is undercutting the OLPC with a product called Classmate.
What seems to have fired up Intel is that OLPC uses AMD microprocessors, and the volumes involved in making a laptop for every child, thought to be around a billion, are so enormous that Intel sees the situation as something it should be involved in.
So, when Negroponte goes to governments looking for orders for OLPC he finds Intel is getting in their as well with marketing documents pointing out the disadvantages of OLPC compared to Classmate. Moreover he says Intel is selling Classmate at a loss. Negroponte calls Intel's behaviour "shameless".
This stalls the OLPC's progress towards achieving high volume and, consequently, the $100 laptop.
That the Intel vs AMD war is now being fought over the poorest people on the planet is utterly bizarre.
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