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.
The PIC is a complete solution, supported through a local service provider
Look! It's got recurring revenue generation built in! Not only can you pay for it up front, but you can keep paying for it month after month; forever! ALl the while you'll be giving control of it over to your favorite ISP, who can reduce it's functionality at their whim, or upon lawsuit, whichever comes first.
Where do I sign up?
(Also: How long until Microchip slaps them with a trademark suit?)
Interesting choice of name. It implies that there might be something interesting on the inside, once you get past the cruft on the outside.
This web page may be of use: How To Break Open A Geode! Oddly enough, some of the information may apply to this particular type of "Geode":
"Below I will describe the most popular methods to opening geodes (besides sawing them). There are many different ways to open a geode, but no matter how you do it, the key is PATIENCE, PATIENCE, PATIENCE! If you want the geode to break into two halves, you absolutely CANNOT just hit it as hard as you want to with a hammer! If it is hollow, you will be left with pieces in most cases, not two halves!"
The page goes on to detail:
* Hammer/Chisel Method
* Sock Method
* Pipe Cutter Method
I want one already!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
(without a screen included!)
Did I miss something? Do they expect people to just plug in to someone else's monitor whenever they want to use it?
I am so pleased that this device is "striped down." Now if we could only get some stripes going across, we'd have a real winner!
Monthy circular image
"You've got questions - we've got cellphones" -- and now, not-cheap-enough computers, too.
Sold with compulsory Windows license.
*plonk*
When is someone going to start selling some decent Linux portables? (I know, Nokia's 770... some time later this year.)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I know there will be a flood of comments about how easily someone could build a computer for $3.57 using spare dishwasher parts, but all kidding aside, AMD might have priced this machine a bit too high for the intended market.
One can build a base model Dell desktop (running XP Home on a 2.4Ghz processor) for around $300 (less with rebates and special offers).
Considering this is running a neutered version of Windows and is designed to perform only the most basic tasks, I'm surpised it is priced so high.
Bazorg!
$300 AND Windows® Powered Operating System? Hmmm. I can get a plain vanilla box for that these days with more power and options. Not as cute maybe, but more useful in the long run.
The smartest man in the whole, wide world really don't know that much. - Mose Allison
Previous stories:
Introduction
and
Initial Commentary & Photos
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?
Ok. Let's look at everything wrong with this product...
No monitor. How does a product designed for "first-time technology users" not include a monitor? What exactly are they expected to plug it in to? The typical first-time users do not have old CRT monitors sitting around, colecting dust like most /.ers.
Cheap, cheap disk. 10GB hard drive? TigerDirect.com advertises a 300GB SATA hard drive for $90. 10GB is pathetic.
Limited software. Ok. I've said this before.. The few reasons that I use windows are MS Office and the wealth of generally available software. This machine doesn't even come with Office and it doesn't even sound like it will let you install it! I bet FireFox is a no-no, too.
Overpriced. In the past, I've priced out $300-$400 systems with generous RAM & hard disk, a good Athlon XP processor, CD burner, etc with no monitor. Of course, that's sans OS and monitor. I wonder how much of that $300 goes to Microsoft for the Windows Operating System?
Although I am by no means a supporter of Linux on the desktop, I think that this is certainly a case where Linux and open source should have been used. As long as they aren't shipping with Office, why not use OpenOffice instead of "TextMaker"? What's the point of paying Microsoft for Licensing if you aren't going to give the customers any of the benefits of MS Office? They won't even have to deal with the fact that users are just used to Windows since these are targeted at "first-timers"
Just my 2 cents...
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
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 have a Geode 300mhz SBPC myself.. with a 1Gig CF card running DSL Linux on it. But it is in a big, bulky industrial case right now.
It runs nice, if not a little sluggish with some larger aplications.
I like the case AMD is showing... I wonder if I can make something similar.
If they're trying to get into the Mac Mini market, they should really have put more effort into getting a device that looks better. The device sounds like a good concept, but who wants to put something that doesn't look great in their kitchen? On the other hand, the Mac Mini (although it's more expensive) seems like it received a lot more polishing on the outside. I know... it's an Appple product. But other companies should have caught on that good looking products are important if they want to reach a large market share for an electronic applicance?
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.
As I recall, this device was originally hailed as a PC for developing nations, priced at around $100. Looks like they missed their target.
As an Internet appliance, this doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell: it's too expensive, too big, too ugly, and it runs the wrong kind of software.
Probably the main reason it missed its target is its operating system--Windows is far too heavyweight. Companies like Linksys have no trouble putting out $50 Linux systems like the WRT 54G; if they replaced the wireless on that box with video out, you'd have the hardware for an Internet appliance.
These aren't meant to compete with the mac mini or any small form factor systems. They're for underdeveloped nations and the such, and you cant install software on them. It's mainly only for internet connectivity, hence the name, "Personal Internet Communicator." AMD donated 200 of these to Katrina shelters around Texas so that evacuees had a way of accessing the internet to find lost family members and such. You can read more about the Personal Internet Communicator and the AMD 50x15 program here.
(Disclaimer: I don't work at AMD or sell any of their products. I'm just a fan.)
Through a local small computer company with ties to AMD, I've been beta testing AMD's GX Thin Client product, which is based on a Geode GX 533 processor (which runs at 400MHz). Granted, this isn't the exact product listed in the story, but it's built on the same platform and only seems to differ, really, in that the Thin Client doesn't include a hard drive.
The first thing one notices about the Thin Client is its size. It's small. Most hardcover novels are considerably larger than the Thin Client. Most Linksys routers are larger than the Thin Client.
The Thin Client includes flash memory for storage (128MB, if I recall), which you can take out and replace with a CompactFlash card (using the provided adapter). The Thin Client I received included a version of Windows XP Embedded and Windows CE. The performance under XP Embedded was surprisingly poor. Simply moving a window around the screen rapidly could bring the system to its knees. Windows CE, however, was pretty responsive but ultimately not very useful.
On the bright side, it runs Linux. Just load up a slim distro (Debian Base, Slackware, Damn Small Linux, etc.) onto a CF card with the appropriate drivers (which AMD doesn't yet publish on their site--I got them from one of the project leaders--but I'm sure they'll be available once the Thin Client hits the market). It works swimmingly.
Now for a bit of bad news: the Thin Client only has USB 1.1 ports, so you're limited to ~11Mbps transfer speeds over USB. It has built-in 10/100 Ethernet, but you'll never hit anywhere near 100Mbps. The processor becomes your bottleneck when it comes to any kind of network utilization. (I never seem to get above 15Mbps.) File transfers will be limited by the R/W speed of the CF card. I would not expect to use this kind of device for anything multimedia-related, nor anything that requires even moderate processing power.
But the Geode does shine in one area that's very important to me: power consumption. The processor draws about 6W under an average load. In standby, it draws less than 1W. (The rest of the system draws a few more watts, of course.) This is important to me because I have a couple of sites (I work for a WISP) that run off of wind and solar power. Since the Geode consumes less power than the average night light, I can plug it into one of those sites and not worry about it. I wouldn't even consider putting an EPIA-based machine at one of those sites--it would drain the batteries in just a few hours.
The Geode isn't very good at running a GUI or any processor-intensive application. It is, however, good at running services like Apache, Nagios, and others.
I think AMD is marketing these devices to the wrong crowd--they shouldn't be general-purpose computers for the third-world (the $100 laptop would put this to shame in terms of value). It should, however, be marketed to network geeks who need monitoring and testing tools at various locations across their network. No other device comes close in terms of cost and power consumption.
I plan on buying dozens of the Thin Clients once they hit the market. They might not be perfect in every way (the processor-limited network transfers bug me), but they do have their uses.