The world‘s biggest chipmaker will join the board of the non-profit One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation, which developed the XO laptop - a personal computer that it plans to put into production in September and sell for $176.

The announcement comes after OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte said in May that the silicon giant "should be ashamed of itself" for efforts to undermine his initiative. He accused Intel which markets Classmate PC, a computer that competes with the foundation‘s XO laptop.

The two parties said they would be able to incorporate each other‘s technologies, and would also consider collaborating on developing a laptop.

Intel‘s Will Swope was quoted in a BBC news report as having said, "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."

The foundation plans to sell the laptops to government agencies around the world, requiring each country to buy hundreds of thousands of the devices, then give them to underprivileged elementary school children at no cost.

Both the companies said they had yet to decide whether the chipmaker would be able to commercialise XO‘s display and power management capabilities, which experts regard as breakthrough technologies.

Under the new agreement, Intel will sit alongside 11 companies that are part of the OLPC scheme including Google and Red Hat and rival chip-maker AMD, which supplies the processor at the heart of the $100 laptop.