The Indian government unveiled plans for a £7 laptop – the world’s cheapest computer. While details of the laptop are scarce, its creators say it will connect to the internet wirelessly, come with a reasonably fast 2GB memory and use just two watts of power.
The Indian government said the prototype could be ready within six months. However, computer experts are skeptical about whether a laptop could ever be that cheap - and how good it could be. Some believe £70 is a more realistic price.
Work on the credit crunch computer, known as the Sakshat, which means 'before your eyes', is taking place at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras.
If it can be produced for just £7, or 500 rupees as the government claims, it will be £120 cheaper than its nearest low cost rival. The XO was developed for the One Laptop Per Child project
Details of the Sakshat were announced at the launch of a new education programme. India's higher education secretary R P Agrawal said: 'A lot of testing has to be done to ensure that the technology works properly.
'Once the testing is over, the computers will be made available on a commercial basis. The target is to make it available in six months time.' Last year, India unveiled the world's cheapest car - the £1,450 Tato Nano. It has also created a £10 mobile phone.
In Britain, the cheapest laptops available in the high street cost around £250. The government has spent more than £600 million developing the laptop over the past three years. To keep costs down, it is unlikely to come with Microsoft Windows but will use a simple version of the free Linux operating system.
The announcement of the ultra cheap laptop kept the internet blogs and chat rooms buzzing today. Many people were sceptical that the computer would be anything more than a 'souped up calculator', while others suggested its announcement was tied to forthcoming Indian elections. The respected website arstechnica.com said the price of computer parts was too high - and that a screen alone would cost £20.
'Can India do it? The inner-philanthropist hopes so but the realist who buys technology says "No way",' the site concluded. Rajesh Jain, managing director of Netcore Solutions and a pioneer of low-cost computing in India, said: 'You cannot even make a computer screen for US$20. And India does not build much computer hardware. So where will the savings come from?'
India's £7 laptop will compete with the American One Laptop per Child project which tried to create a computer costing less than £70. The project was hit by problems when high profile electronics companies refused to get involved.
Meanwhile a supercomputer with the processing power of two million laptops is to be built by IBM for the US government to help manage its nuclear arsenal. IBM announced it was developing the technology for its 'Sequoia' system, which will be easily the fastest computer on the planet, with delivery to the Department of Energy (DOE) scheduled in 2011.
According to IBM, Sequoia will be able to achieve performance speeds of up to 20 petaflops or 20,000 trillion calculations a second. IBM estimates that the computing power of the Sequoia system will be greater than that of every one of the current systems on the Top 500 supercomputer rankings combined.
The system will be housed at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Source : www.dailymail.co.uk
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