Yesterday, I briefly attended a summit at Mountain View's Computer History Museum jointly organised by Intel and the United Nations Global Alliance for Information and communication technologies and Development (UNGAID). A United Nations initiative to bring the benefits of information technologies to developing countries around the world. There Intel presented prototypes of its $300 Classmate PC: a 7" screen Wi-Fi laptop with a Celeron processor and an embedded version of Windows XP (the ones on display were running Windows XP Pro), with an estimated 4 hours of battery life.

Meanwhile, at the same time in San Francisco, AMD was showing off its One Laptop per Child (OLPC) PC at a press conference in San Francisco hosted by Henri Richard, AMD's marketing guru. Same goal of a cheap laptop for poor communities or "high growth markets" [sic] but radically two different strategy.

The screen beats any of the notebooks that you have here and that you paid 30 times the price of this device. It can be read at full sun light, consumes less than 2 watts and has a lifetime that is far greater than any of yours!

Then, Richard candidly admitted trying get Intel to collaborate on a common project,

I offer to pull our resource together, because if there's an engineer at my competitor and an engineer at AMD that is doing the same developments for those markets, we're wasting money and time. There's an urgent crisis out there. Even there, there are areas of collaboration

But,

Unfortunately, my pledge to collaborate was rejected. But i think that when it comes to doing what's right in bridging the digital divide and helping the high-growth markets, competition should not exist

Don't hold your breathe. I don't think will see an AMD-Intel PC anytime soon... at least in our lifetime! Sad, really...