AMD's Personal Internet Communicator

mstefanus writes "SFGate.com has a story about AMD's 50x15 Personal Internet Communicator (PIC). It is basically a PC with an AMD Geode GX500 366MHz processor, 10GB hard drive and 128MB Memory; running some form of Windows CE. The device is intended as a cheap internet PC for the rest of the world population. AMDBoard has some pictures and specifications. The question is, will it run emm... FreeBSD?"

Comments

A modest proposal

[erick99]

I wonder if for $349, a hundred dollars more, they could produce a similar package for here in the US with a nic instead of a modem along with some sort of optical drive. I think they would sell like crazy. It would come with some newbie-friendly flavor of Linux and the user could always change that if they want, but why add a lot of cost upfront for an operating system. There are a lot of people in the US that will not be able to buy a computer unless they can get the price down to something like $350 or so. If this $249 machine can be profitable, then I think this $349 machine could be profitable as well and we'd be helping people here, as well as abroad. Or, am I just completely missing something?

Re:A modest proposal

[pilgrim23]

This is all well and good but.... It will never fly. Know why? For a decade America has been upgrading. That is, we have all traded in our 486 for a Pentium 65, for a Pentium 166, for a Pentium 2, 3 AMD, Cirix, and on and on. That original 486 running Win 3.1 with a 14.4 or 33.6 modem running Trumpet Winsock (rememebr that?) can get ont he Internet. And where did all that junk go? To the Third World by the dumptruck load!
A even more modest Pentium 300ish or a AMD K6-2 of about that speed on a socket 7 motherboard with 90-256mb memory a 2-6gb drive a 14" VGA.. load a bootleg 98SE and: you are in business! Cost? no 250 bucks, rather more like 20. Folks in Botswana would rather spend the $230 savings on FOOD! Poor folks do not buy new. Regardless of focus groups, break out sessions, and marketing strategies. I would strongly suggest to the good people who come up with these hair brained ideas to do their research somewhere that does not selll Late`. for example: Check the price at Goodwill.

Re:A modest proposal

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't do Thurga a crapload of good that he can buy a broken down 7 year old computer for $20 here in the US, by the time he ships it to Botswana it will cost him $350. Then he needs the mad skillz to get a pirate OS and install it himself. Just so it can fail 3 months later from bouncing around a container ship after churning through a good chunk of the localy available electricity. Excellent plan, matey!

Now, when the Botswana educational system and the Botswana community center want to provide a way to communicate wit the outside world and research why they crops keep failing or what to do about that nasty lump growing on Jr's neck or maybe let somebody know the next tribe over used their $250 to by a couple used AK-47's so they could take everybody else's food, they have a means. The reason why the Western world has advanced farther in the last 20 years than it did from the first 5,000 years of man is communication. Spoken words to written words to printed books to telegraphs to telephones to radio to tv to computers to the internet. Buy 100 lbs of rice your village eats for 6 months, sell "native talismans" on eBay for 6 months and buy the first Botswana McDonalds franchise.

Re:A modest proposal

[BrianH]

Yes, but you don't even need Internet access to make this thing useful. What use would they have for a computer without Internet? We tend to be spoiled for space in our world of MP3's, video files, and multigigabyte games, but we cannot forget that a gigabyte is a LOT of data. A 20 gigabyte hard drive can hold as much text as an ENTIRE LIBRARY.

You have to look at these types of products in the context of how their going to be used. Nobody living in a shack in Botswana is going to be surfing EBay on this, and a Ghanian tribesman isn't going to give a flying rock about how it runs Half Life 2. What they're going to care about is the fact that they can add an entire library to their remote village for $249 thats compact enough to be easily moved when the river rises and they have to evacuate on foot every spring, thats integrated and durable enough so that they won't have to worry about shaking the PCI cards loose if they set it down too hard, and that will draw little enough power to run happily on their villages 20 watt in-stream hydro generator or 15 watt solar panel without frying itself.

The world is a lot bigger than the west people, and this type of hardware is badly needed in many parts of the world. Yes, you can probably piece one together using cheap Internet sourced parts for a lower cost, but will it have the durability, the low power consumption, and the ease of transport that this thing offers? Can you honestly tell me that Bahooba the tribal elder, who has probably never even held a phillips screwdriver in his entire life, would be better off building his own PC? These people need something braindead simple...plug in the wire, turn it on, and use it. When you live in an area where the nearest computer tech is 100 miles away on foot, you don't have the luxury of buying untested hardware configurations and calling for support when you run into a problem.

Didn't this already fail once...

[tha_mink]

Didn't the consumer market decide that it didn't want this type of thing before? What was that thing that Be INC made again? (besides failure)

Re:Didn't this already fail once...

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Yes exactly. Back in 98/99, the big hype in embedded computing circles was things called "set-top boxes" (read things like WebTV boxes). Everybody absolutely *had* to get into doing set-top boxes, despite the astoundingly dismal sales volumes. That trend has come and gone thank goodness.

So, while this thing is technically better (it uses a computer screen, not a TV), it is definitely more expensive (the usually accepted price point for set-top boxes is $100), and it is proven the public doesn't give a flying fuck about them. So the question is, what is it those guys are hoping to achieve here?

No,

[Scythr0x0rs]

The question is, will it run emm... FreeBSD?
It'll run FreeBSD. The question is,
will it run windows?

Perfect

[Pan T. Hose]

This is a perfect killer-application for Gmail. Now Google should concentrate on persistent documents (a la Office) productivity suit, and no one will ever need a desktop PC with a hard drive. Is this how the future will look like?

Um... No.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Not in my opinion.

I think that is still too expensive of a computer to get into the hands of those that don't have one. A second hand 1GHz computer would probably be a lot cheaper and more suitable for running modern browsers. At least this is pretty power efficient, but even Via probably has more powerful CPUs that are sufficiently low power.

Re:First Post?

[LittleGuernica]

Does it run solitaire?, because I know some people who would be satisfied with that, they don't need an AMD 64

excellent!

[Coneasfast]

just what i was looking for. i need something for http/ftp/print/etc server. and also something for a freebsd firewall, a full computer would be too much.

good job AMD (if it runs FreeBSD)!

wow, slick case

[donscarletti]

It's incredible that a gadget that is designed to be cheap, utilitarian and mass produced still looks better than any custom riced up case mods I have ever seen before.

Kinda sad really.

Why ship it with WinCE?

[PornMaster]

If it's got a 10GB HD, why's it using WinCE? performance on a slow CPU? How have the WinCE apps done security-wise vs. Win32 apps for "regular" Windows?

Re:Why ship it with WinCE?

[dotcher]

PocketPC is built on CE as a base - CE is a kernel and some services, and includes things like a shell and a command line interpreter, both based on desktop Windows.

PocketPC replaces the shell, adds some apps, and has the configuration tweaked for the specific device it's on. The smartphone variant is similiar.

xbox?

[duranaki]

Seems like you could just hack an xbox to get better performance for cheaper. And already as NIC card and optical drive. Someone just needs to start selling hacked xbox to third world countries. The best part is the M$ subsidizes their cost, so it really would be charity. :)

An immodest proposal

[shis-ka-bob]

I wonder if they could strip it down and get rid of the hard drive and use a bootable Ethernet card. If you are on a lan with a NFS server running dhcpd, rarpd and tftpd, you can have the computer boot as a diskless workstation. Convince your ISP to run these services and privide users with a home directory. That would be a sweet way to provide a zero maintenance PC to anyone. Diskless FreeBSD is discussed at http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2004/09/09/diskles s_server.html

Re:Of course it runs...

[grm_wnr]

Of course it will run any BSD or Linux

Everything does, sooner or later. It is INEVITABLE.

Modem vs. NIC

[Ping-Wu]

It just appears to be that you can easily add an NIC card via its USB port, but not modem. Looks like this is an ingenius, well-thought-of design. I want one if it runs a strip down version of Fedora.

Budget... yeah right

[rackhamh]

$249 is cheap here, but does it qualify as a "budget" machine in the target markets (India, Russia, China, Mexico and Brazil)? According to this site, the average income in Brazil's largest metropolitan areas is less than $300 a month!

Re:Budget... yeah right

[rewt66]

The personal computer revolution in the US had a lot of computers that cost one month's average income (or more), back in the 1980s. We still bought an awful lot of them, and the computer revolution took off here.

The computer doesn't have to be "budget" in the sense of "find that much money in the couch cushions". But if the average person can manage to get their hands on one if they try reasonably hard, that's a big deal.

Who ordered this?

[frovingslosh]

For $249 it's not partiularly inexpensive, fast or useful. Although it might be had to find parts like a hard drive of only 10 gig any more (at least for any manufacturing project where you want to make a number of the product over a year or more of time and have a viable supply of identical parts for the run), I certainly can put together a more capable PC for $249 with off the shelf parts. I expect third world users who look to spend a month or more of income on a PC are more likely to want to buy as much computer as they can for their money rather than care much that it comes in a small plastic box (and runs slow, has limited storage, and includes an OS that the user paid something for but will have to ditch).

That's not a PC...

[fbg111]

It's Xbox Next, in disguise.

I know we're supposed to hate MS here, but...

[aardwolf204]

Having the system loaded with a version of Windows CE may actually be a good thing. Not better than having a version of embedded linux, but better then XP. So far the only worm/virus/trojan I know of is a proof of concept trojan that was emailed to an AntiVirus vendor for Pocket PC, and it didn't actually do anything.

With the amount of spyware and other nasties out there preying on naive internet users it would be in everyone's best interest to keep these machines on an embedded platform. First a trojan/virus/worm would need to be created to take advantage of this platform which is new territory to the evil doers. Second, the user base is small and the machines are not very powerful so the advantage to writing a nasty for this platform are small. And third, even if the PC were to be infected it could be cleaned by a simple hard reset. If I ever were to totally hose my Pocket PC (and I'm not sure how I could do that) I could always hard reset the device and copy my data back from CF backup. Sure, you could do the same with linux setup with partition that contains an image that would overwrite the OS upon each boot but this is still a step in the right direction.

I'm not saying I would want one of these things, unless they scaled them down and sold them cheaper in which case they could make nice low cost cam/file/web/router/vpn/etc/servers, but I think I'll stick with VIA on that for now.

This would be great for my grandparents, especially if you could remotely administer them.

Shameless Plug: Williamsburg VA FireFox 1.0 Release Party

My Prediction: It Won't Fly

[RAMMS EIN]

I don't think this kyte is going to fly. Here's why:

$ 185 is a lot of money. It's not worth it for many people. Especially if you can buy a 2200+ powered PC with modem and NIC, a larger hard drive, a standard form factor case and motherboard, etc. etc. for around the same price (I can buy them for 199 euros).

So, poor people won't spend their money on it, and slightly richer people will get a better deal at a slightly higher price. And you can get a pretty decent PDA for less.

Just what Steve Ballmer was looking for!

[ARRRLovin]

In future news, Steve Ballmer eats crow after finding out the price of hardware has no effect on the piracy of MS software.

Re:The only thing missing is...

[ePhil_One]

but the indended market is less industrialized countries

I suspect this may be a case of not knowing your mrkets. In less industrialized markets, copper phone lines are rare. Cellular phones, WiFi, and other new technologies will be the source of connectivity.

TV out

[maddh]

if they wanted to reach a poorer population they should have a regular TV coax output along side the VGA.

Already available?

[Stephen Samuel]

My neighbourhood computer store sells pretty much such a machine (note that prices are in Canadian Dollars -> ~ $.80US/$1.00CAD). An AMD 2700 with 256MB ram, 40GB drive and CDROM for $289CAD -> $230US.It has an onboard 10/100 ethernet rather than a modem. Add Linux and a used monitor, and you're Rocking.

I presume that you could find something similar in the US.

Firewall? you don't get no stinkin' firewall!

[frovingslosh]

But after looking, my first thought was "have to get one to use as router/firewall"

No, I can't build it as tiny with off-the-shelf parts. But that's hardly the point, since tiny but crippled just doesn't cut it. As to your thought of getting one to use as a firewall, well, lets just say you might give it a bit more thought. The damn thing has a 56k modem, but apparently no ethernet port. And a decent firewall needs (at least) two ethernet ports; but this thing has no expansion capability. Hope you don't plan on using USB to Ethernet kluges for the connections; they would not only be expensive, but since the spec's only mention USB I'm guessing this is USB 1.1 and not even USB2. So no good for a tiny dedicated device like a firewall, and doesn't compete well with larger computers you can build up from stock parts.

Sure, there are always a small number of dedicated applications that one can use a slow, low power computer for. But there are many other choices available for such projects. This thing wasn't intended to be that, and doesn't compete well in that market. So let's take it for what it claims to be and evaluate it based on that; a very low end PC replacement with a brain dead OS (that in the end the user pays for). It just doesn't stack up against what else is available.