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Chinese Company Produces $150 Linux PC

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the inexpensive-penguins dept.

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."

2 of 325 comments (clear)

  1. Not that cheap: don't even have to factor curreny by everphilski · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Performance claim probably spot on. by Toasterboy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.