This announcement is interesting. I actually wondered when olpc was first announced what the appeal was of the geode, and figured it came down to “we get them ridiculously cheap if we buy them in volume”. The geode is a pretty dire processor when it comes to performance. The C7 isn’t exactly much to write home about either, but comparing them both is like night and day.

As well as the noticable performance boost, olpc 1.5 will get for free: SSE, SSE2, a hardware RNG, hardware accelerated encryption, hardware NX (though this would require PAE to be enabled, which may be considered unncessary overhead on an XO), and frequency/voltage scaling.

If they had done this on day 1, I may have been more interested in using one. My one experience with a 1.0 XO was possibly the most miserable computing experience I recall.