HP Introduces Transmeta Thin Clients

prostoalex writes "HP will announce the T5500 and T5300 thin clients on Monday at the TechEX show in New York City, which use the 733-MHz and 533-MHz versions of Transmeta's TM5800 CPU. Prices range from $599 to $629."

Comments

Wrong pricing

[TrentC]

The submitter misread the article; those prices are for the TM5700, which HP already sells.

It says right at the bottom of the article that the prices for the new units have not been announced.

Jay (=

Specs and Diagrams here:

[watanabe]

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/1174 6_ca/11746_ca.PDF

The specs look like this is aimed at a corporate market? Strange since a whitebox computer would be cheaper. I suppose power consumption, etc. are all important. The T5500 comes with 128mb of RAM, and the 733mhz Crusoe 5800 processor, runs Windows CE and IE 6, and supports Citrix, etc.

I still think I'd prefer a whitebox with no hard drive running LTSP.

Re:Specs and Diagrams here:

[Anonymous Coward]

direct link

Price is incorrect

[Llurien]

The article actually says that the 5700 model which was allready sold by HP for some time has a price range of $599 to $629. The 5700 model uses the 1GHz version of the TM5800. The new thing is that models based on the lower speed processors are introduced, but no prices are known about those yet. I may be kicking in open doors here, but they probably will be lower.

Pictures of T5500 and T5300

[ShadeARG]

Pictures of the T5500 and T5300. (German text)

Fat Client For Same Price

[SlipJig]

You can get an NEC Powermate Eco, which also uses the Crusoe chip, for the same price ($600-650), with 256 MB RAM and a 20GB hard drive. Oh, and a 15" LCD monitor in a compact design.

Re:$600 for a thin client?

[CommandNotFound]

Also, this place has headless units for $350, and they are ready to run as LTSP clients.

Even then, you can get older PII class systems used for less than $50 USD, which would run just fine as X terms, with a decent monitor and GFX card.

Re:Uh

[diz]

Uh, maybe you didn't notice that the article said that the 1GHz models have already been on the market for a while and they were releasing slower models. One would expect that these models would be cheaper than the TM5700 clients that are 1GHz and *already on the market* for some time.

With the amount of effort I see people put into making ultra quiet computers, you'd think something like this might actually do well. I'm tired of my own office sounding like a wind tunnel, and I've considered many times moving the white box machines (yes, they're cheap but loud) into a machine room and using something fanless as a remote desktop in my office.

Re:Uh

[dabadab]

"Even decoding xvid would strugle on a 733"

My 500MHz Celeron plays anything without getting anywhere near 100% CPU load. I guess it's mostly a matter of the video card - my Matrox G400 handles some of the stuff (scaling, maybe colorspace conversion).
And of course you DON'T do Xvid encoding on a thin client just as much as you don't do it on an X terminal (what a thin client basically is)

what about the t5700?

[Anonymous Coward]

Too fast for ya? T5700 with 1Ghz Transmeta

Re:Uh

[smatt-man]

It's also the hardware, and the management that makes it slim. If a company buys 500 thin clients, they can manage the hardware from a single workstation. There are less parts to 'go wrong' with a thin client, plus less power consumption. I used to work at a place that used them, it took 3 minutes to go from nothing on someone's desk, to a thin client setup and connected to the Terminal Server. Of course, we bought $300 thin clients, which made it all the better.

Re:$600 for a thin client?

[tashanna]

This is Slashdot.Why would anyone look at the HP Website and check prices.

The 533 MHz = $349
The 733 MHz = $369