Chinese Company Produces $150 Linux PC

srinravi writes to mention an Ars Technica article about another ambitious 'inexpensive computer' project. A Chinese manufacturer, YellowSheepRiver, is aiming to make available a $150 Linux PC built with inexpensive hardware components. From the article: "Urging potential customers to 'Say no to Wintel,' YellowSheepRiver is devoted to using its own Linux distribution and hardware designed and manufactured by Chinese companies. YellowSheepRiver hopes to close the "digital divide" by making computer technology available to the Chinese public at an affordable price. The Municator, which comes with 256MB of RAM, uses a unique 64-bit CPU with an instruction set based on a subset of the MIPS architecture. Designed by a Chinese company called BLX, the the cheap chip is clocked at 400 or 600MHZ and supposedly provides performance comparable to that of an Intel P3."

Comments

Not that cheap: don't even have to factor curreny

[everphilski]

Seeing as you can get a Pentium III processor for about $10, 256MB RAM for $25 (both on Pricewatch)... throw in a motherboard ($25) with onboard video, sound, etc. and a hard drive ($30 for a 40gb EIDE) and you have a similar product for cheaper, and we didn't even have to resort to OEM/bulk pricing.

The unique feature is a 64 bit RISC chip and S-video out for a TV interface. No need for a computer monitor.

CeBIT 2006 Demo

[fred911]

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-920346214 8706105599&q=Municator&pl=true

here's a demo of the product.

See the video here

[denisbergeron]

People at linuxdevice have a good article on it and even a link to a interview with a chinesse seller in video made by a french reporter! I post this a some time ago, but people here don't like my syntax.

Re:How much is how much?

[MasterC]

Just randomly picking from a google search finds this PDF which says the average household income for a rural household is 2262 Yuan which is about $327 USD. So a $150 computer would be about 6 months work for a rural family.

The graph on this page confirms the ~2200 Yuan for rural households and shows urban households at just more than double that of rural.

So, from 3 to 6 months net income for an average household.

Performance claim probably spot on.

[Toasterboy]

I have an SGI Octane with dual MIPS R12k 300 mhz and it outperforms a P4 2ghz on floating point ops all the time. Integer performance isn't as good, but that's the way the things are built. Some of the reason it's faster at floating point than a much newer P4 is because each chip has 2MB cache, and MIPS chips have way more registers than intel+friends, but still...it's a ten year old machine.

Even if the MIPS implementation these guys are using is dated and has a teensy cache, 400-600 mhz MIPS would be roughly in the ballpark of a P3... and 64-bit to boot. And have a lot more registers, which makes it easier to write fast code because you dont have to swap things out of your primary (what, four? =P) registers to do anything, like on Intel + friends.

Re:Not that cheap: don't even have to factor curre

[mspohr]

Or you could just buy the LinspirePC from TigerDirect which includes a 2.4GHz Celeron, 256Meg, 40 Gig HD, CD-RW, network, integrated graphics and audio for $199.

(Please restrain yourselves from flaming about Linspire, TigerDirect, Celeron, etc.... this IS a CHEAP machine. It does, however, show what can be done at the low end of the market.)

products specs

[Janek Kozicki]

Is it so difficult for the article submitter, to provide a link to the actual product ?