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.

Comments

storage

[bazorg]

10Gb hard drive doesn't look very impressive. Considering that these days it isnt that common to find HDD that small, wouldn't it be better to have a flash memory storage like a portable media player? Would that be reasonable considering the size, cooling needs, overall price? would it work at all ? :)

Bazorg!

Why oh why windows?

[frinkacheese]

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?

Where's the "news"?

[Migraineman]

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 ...

Useful application

[parasonic]

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.

Target market?

[pla]

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.

Re:Perpetual Payment Processing

[ncc74656]

When a regular joe asks from me, what to buy, i just say that the last item [a white box] is extendeable and upgradeable, the first [the appliance described in the article] is probably not.

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.)

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).

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.