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

How much is how much?

[Dutchmaan]

Bear in mind that $150 dollars probably means a lot more in the Chinese economy than it does here in the U.S.

Basically, how much is $150 to the average chinese citizen?

So, when do we get one over here?

[the_humeister]

With the death of commodity of PowerPC computers imminent with Apple's switch, this can fill the niche for commodity alternative architectures. I'd get one if it comes here. Hopefully it won't be a "Lisa Lionheart."

But can it run Linux?

[OctoberSky]

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

But can it run (my) Linux?

Re:1 problem

[Burlap]

of course it's a clunker... its $150! but look at the target buyers, first time computer users on a VERY limited income. They arn't aiming at the hardcore gamers, even the casual web serfer is well above the bar that they are aiming for. let me put it another way.... if all you can aford is a mo-ped, will you really be complaining you didnt get a BMW?

Why put a drive in there?

[kawika]

Clearly with specs like this it's not going to run any heavy-duty apps, so I would think a typical application would be to run a browser and web/intranet apps to keep the client footprint small. Instead of a 40GB drive, why not put 2GB of flash onto the board formatted as a file system, and make the spinning drive optional? That would reduce power consumption and increase reliability.

BLX allegedly stole MIPS architecture

[Anonymous Coward]

It's easy to make stuff cheap when you are stealing IP from the USA. Thanks again China!

http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/business/showAr ticle.jhtml?articleID=166402034

Can you find it anywhere?

[xenocide2]

Apparently this is somewhere between 2 months to half a year old. Someone on digg was trying to get ahold of these for mass purchase and failed to get any replies. I haven't seen any pictures floating around of this thing in the wild online. You can't buy them anywhere. Multiplied by the fact that BLX hasn't acquired a MIPS liscence (their CPU likely borrows certain patents originally designed for MIPS, given how similar it is), I doubt you'll see many of these floating around on eBay. Some theorize it's a grandstand by the Chinese government to demonstrate how much better they are than other local countries such as Korea, Taiwan or Japan. Plausible, but I suspect this is just the first visible vaporware company out of China.

In summary, it's not a 150 dollar device until you can acquire one somewhere at that price.

very interesting

[MORTAR_COMBAT!]

Looks like it would make a decent little headless server, for http/imap/ftp/etc. The Godson-3 (successor to this Godson-2) chip plans look even more interesting. basically take a 4-pipeline 64-bit superscalar MIPS chip (Godson-2) and put 4 cores on a chip.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/08/01/HNgodson 2_1.html

Assuming, though, that legal and patent issues don't prevent it being sourced in US-bound computers and components...