Slashdot Mirror
AMD Geode Internet Appliance
Justin Davidow writes "For a new twist on internet appliances, AMD is finally attempting to go mainstream with their mobile Geode processor, with the Personal Internet Communicator (PIC), a stand-alone device that allows users a striped down laptop/inflated PDA (without a screen included!) for internet surfing.
Expected retail price: $299USD." Be cool to play around with - I'd love to test it out.
Expected retail price: $299USD." Be cool to play around with - I'd love to test it out.
Bazorg!
How much does the license add to the price? It does not do anything a Linux box would not do with Firefox, StarOffice and whatever else. Hell, stick Lindows on it and it'll be a much nicer solution.
But why Windows?
LinuxDevices has an article about this device shipping in October of 2004 ... that'd be a year ago ...
...
The linked article doesn't provide any information about availablility to the public. I recall that AMD originally said it was going to restrict sales to developing nations, and maybe they've removed that restriction. I don't see any evidence of that, though.
And of course, here's a link to the previous Slashdot discussion
actually it's quite interesting what is the market of this product ? :D
... but on the other hand, it also isnt really that expandable and probably not upgradeable ... let's see what do we get for the 299$
.. the last one is extendable by pci cards, will support faster processor and has a cdrw in it and has 4x times the hdd space (and can have a 80gb drive for 5-10$ more).
.. doesnt sound to good for the PIC.
:D. if you call a serious pic16C84 fanatic and tell him that you cant see a website on your pic, he will think you had too much to drink for the night lol.
... but most probably they do).
out of the box, it seems like a regular pc that i can get from any local store over here for the same money
yea it's compact and fanless
Compact, ergonomically designed system
case with optional accent colors
Unit dimensions
- 5.5" wide x 8.5" deep x 2.5" high
- 3 lbs.
AMD Geode(TM) GX processor
4 USB ports - support printers,
Flash memory, disk drives, and
network adapters
10GB 3.5" internal hard disk
Internal 56K v.92 modem
Stereo headphone/microphone jacks
VGA port - supports resolutions up to
1600x1200 at 85 Hz
Fanless, quiet operation
aint that just the buzz ?
for the same price from the local store :
*AMD Sempron 2500+ 64bit,
*256MB DDR PC2700/333,
*MB SIS760/VIA K8M800 chipset, Int. VGA (free 8xAGP slot) , int. sound card and ethernet card
*HDD 40GB 7200rpm
*CDRW 52x32x52
*Minitower 300W mATX Codegen 1012
*Keyboard, Optical mouse.
so now
When a regular joe asks from me, what to buy, i just say that the last item is extendeable and upgradeable, the first is probably not. The joe also usually thinks about using the box after 2 years and maybe doing some replacement/repair works on it
Ofcourse the amd pic box looks cool, but it's not really meant for 3D gaming and most office users dont need a green box that they can't upgrade. gamers would like it by the look and the portability, but probably running the newest 3d games at 10fps wont really bite it through.
Great idea from amd. But the price is way too high for what it provides.
I think amd should add a windows-less variant of the same box, with a reduced priced ofcourse (if the box would cost 199$ it would be a bit more fair).
And who in $#%^@#$^@@'s name came up with the name PIC ? PIC is a microcontroller, always has been and in the tech people's mind always will be
ps. is the PIC from amd compatible with linux ? when can we see the first mods of that one ? (I wouldnt be sure if all the devices in it support linux
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
I couldn't find it on there whether it takes a DC input, though it says that it has an AC/DC adaptor. This might prove to be a little interesting in what it can be applied to. It looks like a good size to be a car computer, and the casing appears to be rugged enough for that. At work, we have a Geode machine that's about the size of a 5 1/4" drive, and it actually operates off a 5VDC digital camera power supply including the 2.5" HDD. If no inverter to ~18VDC is required and only a voltage regulator is needed, this might just be the carputer enthusiast's dream.
I've come to appreciate low-power-consumption (and the resulting low-heat and low-noise) over the past year.
The Geode looks absolutely amazing, like taking the Epia line to an extreme, with both lower power than the Nehemiahs and higher performance than the C3s.
However... At a price of $300, it strikes me as odd that they would market this as a sort of super-PDA rather than as an super-quiet-and-low-power PC. And even then, that seems like a rather high price for such a system... Perhaps half that much would work well, but I can get an actual PC for $300.
The PDA market has saturated. Everything from "real" PDAs to cell phones to music players to handheld gaming systems now offer a largely overlapping set of features, and which you pick really depends on your primary intended use (calls, music, or games, basically).
The low-power PC market, however, still only has a single player, the Epia. And not really a "perfect" choice, either, since it performs abysmally (good enough for home servers and internet gateways, but don't expect it to ever double as a light-duty interactive machine for a user to sit at). And even in that role, they still draw a non-trivial amount of power (Mine, with a CF card as the primary IDE device, uses around 20W) - A quarter of what a carefully built PC draws, but 5-10x what a dedicated router draws.
Since AMD's first mumblings about the Geode line (their own version, the NX - Not the GX line they bought from National), I have seen it as a potential real alternative to Epia boards. Guess this shows that AMD has no intention of approaching that particular market, much to my dissapointment.
I mean the whole reason this thing is cool is cuz it's small & simple, who was the genius who said "Hey, this thing is really small! Let's make it look giant and ugly so people really dont wanna buy it!"
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
20 years ago, that was how I convinced my parents to buy an Apple IIe instead of a IIc: the IIe's slots made it more likely to be able to adapt to future needs. (Yes, that machine eventually saw all sorts of add-ons. 1 MB RAM, a SCSI card for a hard drive, a mouse, and a 10-MHz accelerator were only some of the goodies I added to it.)
Fry's already has white boxes at $199. They're usually built around VIA processors and typically come with 30-40 GB of disk, 128 MB of RAM, and Lindows/Linspire/Lin-whatever-we're-calling-oursel ves-this-week. They've sold them in the past for as little as $99, usually on holiday weekends.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
16M is sufficient for running X11, a good web browser, and mail client. In any case, upping the memory to, say, 128M and flash to 256M wouldn't make the thing much more expensive.