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The One Laptop Per Child Project and Microsoft plan to make both Windows and Linux available on a version of the project’s XO laptop, the companies said Thursday.

The parties expect to deliver a dual-boot XO system in August or September that will have both the traditional Linux-based Sugar operating system of the XO and a low-cost student version of Windows XP, according to Kyle Austin, an OLPC representative.

OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte has referred in the past to a dual-boot XO model, but this is the first official announcement of such a system. The XO was developed by OLPC for children in developing countries. The availability of Windows on the system will give customers more choice in operating systems and let them use Windows-based educational software and tools, the parties said. Customers and partners worldwide have asked for Windows on the XO, they said.

Austin said the dual-boot system will have Sugar and Microsoft’s Student Innovation Suite, a US$3 software offering that Chairman Bill Gates announced last year. Gates said the suite would include a version of Windows XP, Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, Microsoft Math 3.0, Learning Essentials 2.0 for Microsoft Office and Windows Live Mail.

A Microsoft representative confirmed the XO would have a version of Windows XP but said the specifics were yet to be determined.

Trials of Windows on the laptops will begin in June in select countries, they said. During the trial, Windows will reside on an SD (Secure Digital) card in the laptop’s SD slot, according to Austin, but in the final shipping machine, both OSes will be on the hard drive.

OLPC is working with third-party developers to have the XO’s distinctive Sugar user interface placed on top of Windows, but the dual-boot systems coming later this year will use the Windows interface for Student Innovation Suite, Austin said.

Microsoft and OLPC did not specify the price of the dual-boot system on Thursday.

IBM Tuesday unveiled a new blade server based on the Cell chip that was originally designed to run a video game console.

The IBM BladeCenter QS22 runs the new PowerXCell 8i chip, a souped up version of the Cell processor jointly developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba to run large computations on the Playstation 3 video game system. Instead of running operating systems, the Cell chip takes on massive calculations, making it well-suited for video games or supercomputing tasks.

The updated Cell chip has 16 times more memory and is five times faster than the original, IBM said.

“The new Cell chip is up to 20 times faster on some common financial calculations than Intel’s quad-cores,” said Dan Olds, an analyst with the Gabriel Consulting Group. “The real advantage is being able to run a lot of workloads a lot faster than you thought possible. It could potentially be a game changer for some companies.”

Olds added that the new system will let IT managers run projects in house using much less hardware. “If you’re currently using 20 Intel- or AMD-based systems, you could replace that with one of these blades,” he added. “Think of the difference.”

While IBM has used Cell blades in the new Roadrunner supercomputer that they’re building for Los Alamos National Laboratory now, this is the first time they’ll be selling them for more than research applications.

The Cell-based blades are largely expected to give Roadrunner enough of a power boost to enable it to bypass the petaflop barrier when it’s fully tested later this month.

The QS22 blade is designed to work in supercomputers or in a large corporate data center, according to Olds. It can be used on its own or along side other blades, like those based on AMD and Intel processors.