After their previous war of words with the OLPC foundation, Intel have show a sharp change of approach.

Back in May founder of OLPC foundation Nicholas Negroponte said Intel ‘should be ashamed of itself’.  Intel had apparently been selling its entry level Classmate laptop to gain a share of the emerging market of laptops for schools in developing countries.

The BBC reports that Will Swope of Intel announced, “What happened in the past has happened… But going forward, this allows the two organisations to go do a better job and have a better impact for what we are both very eager to do, which is help kids around the world.”  Nicholas Negroponte said, “Intel joins the OLPC board as a world leader in technology, helping reach the worlds children.”

So what does this mean for AMD, the chipmaker currently producing all of the OLPC XO’s  CPU’s?  Not much so far.  There are currently no plans to change the processor to an Intel model.  A statement from AMD read “Intel’s apparent change of heart is welcome, and we’re sure they can make a positive contribution to this very worthy project for the benefit of children all over the world,” What is know is that the servers used to backup OLPC’s XO laptops will run on Intel technology.

Head of software development at OLPC, Walter Bender, hinted that eventually OLPC would most likely more than one product: “I think we will end up with a family of products that run across a wide variety of needs, Intel will be part of that mix”

The two companies are extremely competitive and can regularly be observed trying to get one step ahead of the other. Will Intel and AMD be able to play nicely together?