As mentioned earlier this week, the new year hasn't been especially kind to the folks at One Laptop Per Child. The last day of 2007 saw the end of their popular Give One Get One program, as well as the departure of their CTO, Mary Lou Jepsen, a key factor in the develop of the technologies that made the XO laptop a reality.

We've yet to enter the second week of 2008, and already they've been dealt another major blow, with the departure of Intel from the organization's board of directors. Of course, the departure of one of the corner stones of the tech world is nothing for a relative upstart non-profit org like OLPC, right? The organization's president, Walter Bender sure seemed to thing so. He said in an interview, "We never really got much going with Intel to have an impact."

Bender went on to call Intel's involvement in the program a, "seemingly half-hearted effort." The chip maker came on board with the organization last July, after a few public spats over the perceived threat of Intel's Classmate PC project. Both sides began work on a version of the XO which contained an Intel-created chip.

"They developed something that, as far as I know, is more expensive and more power-hungry than our current offering, so I'm not quite sure what the point is," Bender told InfoWorld. Before Intel's involvement with the organization, XO laptops had relied solely on AMD chips.

Intel ultimately ended up contributing some $100 million in the six months in which they were involved in the project. Still, Bender seemed to have trouble finding anything nice to say about the company. "The only thing they were interested in was ... helping them make marketing statements about how Intel's approach to learning was different from OLPC's approach to learning. They weren't interested in how we can learn together and make something better for kids."