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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."
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?
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 (my) Linux?
There is a danger that GNU/Linux will get a bad name because it mostly installed on very cheap systems. Often these projects tend to fail and then the scape goat will be GNU/Linux. Better would be that large hardware firms put GNU/Linux on there system. Just imagine Ubuntu on all Dell, HP ... systems. That would be the break for GNU/Linux
To be fair, that's 600 MHz on MIPS, which is quite a bit more clock-efficient than a Pentium 4. Saying "zomg, the P4 has four times the gigahurtz!" is not exactly a fair comparison.
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
I bet this thing filters questionable content right out of the box!
http://religiousfreaks.com/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."
When you watch american kung fu flicks (chuck norris) they automagically get the "out of sync english voiceover" effect.
I ain't drinkin from that river!
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?
It'll be insanely tough to convince customers that a 600mhz, 256mb ram linux machine is equivalent or better than a 2.0ghz, 512mb winbox
You don't have to. You just have to convince them it's a better bang for the buck. Not everyone drives a Mercedes - and it's not because they think their Kias are better cars.
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.
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.
...it tastes baaaaaaaaaad!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-920346214 8706105599&q=Municator&pl=true
here's a demo of the product.
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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.
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
You're forgetting the target audience. To compensate, let's do a thought experiment: Scale the prices up.
Let's say that right now the cheapest PC you could get were $3000 (akin to the Dell $300 box), and a really good one cost $30,000 (think your $3K gaming box). Making a crappy machine for $1500 means that there are a whole bunch of folks would couldn't possibly afford a new computer who now can.
Remember, these things aren't targeted at the US market, and aren't targeted at people who can afford current prices.
It's easy to make stuff cheap when you are stealing IP from the USA. Thanks again China!
r ticle.jhtml?articleID=166402034
http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/business/showA
If they really wanted to make a killing, they'd hamstring the machine to ensure that it could never run Linux, and then the company would make outlandish claims about how Linux will never run on their machine.
Then, there would be a rush of people trying put whatver toaster oven version of Linux on the thing. Within weeks, the free publicity machine would splatter screen shots of those first beautiful lines of [FAILED] [OK] [OK] [FAILED] [DEAR GOD, WHAT DID YOU DO?]I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
In another lost in translation marketing descision an Chinese firm decides to put "Yellow and River" together in their name. I'd call that a piss poor decision?
No, it is simply your total lack of education. Google on "Yellow River China" and you'll find it is one of the most important rivers in the world and along with the Tigris/Euphrates and Nile is where one of the earliest civilizations developed, sometime around 4000 B.C.
It is named after the color of the silt in the water, just like the Red River which is also in China.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
OK...
Communicator
- Communist
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Municator
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.
(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.)
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Plus, who can afford a TV with S-Video inputs but can't afford a low-end VGA monitor?
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
My first x86 computer was a 386 with 2 megs of ram and a 40 MB hard drive.
I used it for word processing, spreadsheets, charts, databases, basic programming and even games!
Our need for something faster is somewhat artificial. People don't need to have the latest and the greatest unless they want floating transparent rotating windows or to play duke nukem forever.
Our perception of utility and function has been distorted by our voracious consumerism.
By our logic and reasoning, if we were ever visited by a more advanced civilization, all of our technology would become obsolete instantly. The fact that it worked right up to that moment is completely irrelevant.
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I sometimes drive my 17 year old car for fun and it works great. It is looked down upon by society, but it does the same basic tasks that the newer cars on the street can.
Is it so difficult for the article submitter, to provide a link to the actual product ?
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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The box from YellowSheepRiver may sound like a bit of an April Fool - too bad it's not called the Munchicator and boots from a .baa file since we are talking sheep - but what we're seeing is another early step from the Chinese economy towards designing, manufacturing and assembling all its own IT stuff right down to the microchips. This may not sound much right now, but it sure will before long. The folks at Intel, AMD and other Wesern chip houses, Dell, etc., must feel a little queasier every time they see an announcement like this. I guess the same may eventually be true on the software side. The box is shipping Linux, but then didn't Microsoft recently ask the Chinese authorities to stop producing naked boxes with no OS on board? I guess the Chinese are now doing exactly what Microsoft asked.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
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.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
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.
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http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/08/01/HNgodso
Assuming, though, that legal and patent issues don't prevent it being sourced in US-bound computers and components...
MORTAR COMBAT!
People who already have a TV?
Am I the only one that doesn't exactly see this as a terrible thing? I don't think it would be a good idea for familes or individuals to have this as their main computer, but think of the other options. Think of public libraries: dozens and dozens of computers where people just want to do Internet research, nothing else. Card catalogues where the only software the computer runs is either a browser or a card database. Think of public kiosks that could be made with free internet access. I'm sure the thing is a piece of crap to run a lot of software, but if you just want a system that runs basic applications (especially a browser), I don't see anything wrong with this.
Do not mark in this space. For official office use only.
Yes but with this computer all the money is staying in China! China sees no reason to give billions of dollars of it's money to the US for Windows or for Intel/AMD cpus.
They see no need to be tied to the X86 ISA.
It makes a lot of sense in that it helps China become more independent of the West and possible make the west more dependant on China.
You want to sell systems to the Chinese government? Someday it may have to have a Chinese CPU in it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
These things aren't actually as crappy as most everyone here seems to believe they are.
... good luck.
I challenge anyone here to actually go out and purchase the equivalent, new (not refurbished/used,) components and put it together into such a small footprint as this thing, with the ability to power it by lithium-ion battery, for under $150 USD.
The most appealing spec to me is the size. This thing is t-i-n-y. With that in mind, here are a couple uses I have thought of for them:
1. Car PC (media player, engine performance monitor, GPS navigation.) You can roll your own Car PC's these days, but for $150?
2. Home automation controller (have a touchscreen monitor mounted into a recessed area in a wall, with this thing inside a small space, which would also be recessed into the wall, under the monitor.)
A much more appropriate name would have been YellowCheapRiver. Ha Ha.,
Thank you. I'll be here all week.
[alk]
Correct me if I'm wrong, of course, but I would have thought that the different style of CPU would make things difficult in terms of driver support, and maybe breaking existing applications for obscure reasons. Though the Chinese will obviously test it thoroughly, I can still forsee architecture problems.
Assuming that this processor is no slower than a 600mhz Pentium III, the machine can easily run a normal set of productivity applications and access the internet. It'll be slow, but not too bad.
As other posters have stated, $150 in rural China is like half a year's pay. Paying more than twice as much for better performance isn't nessisarily the plan. It'd be like if I had gotten a BMW C series instead of my Hyundai Accent - possible, but not nessisarily economically responsible.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
This is extremely similar to Seiko's crappy watches, Toyota's crappy cars, or Intel's crappy computers back in the 70's & 80's. Clayton Christiensen calls it disruptive technologies. You can read more about this phenomenon in his book, "The Innovator's Dilemma". Dr. Christiensen gave a talk at OSCON2005 (I think) that roughly described the contents of the book if you're too lazy to read the whole book, download the podcast at itconversations.com (called Capturing the Upside) and see how cheap crappy (yet decent) products eventually turn the tide. Companies in the past have avoided the cheap low end market simply because they don't want their name associated with it, and plus the margins at the high end sector is usually much more appealing to investors. Dr. Christiensen's ideas were one of the reasons Andy Grove created the Intel Celeron brand to compete with the extremely low end market.
Why is this a problem?
First, applications ARE available on "alternate" (from your point of view) platforms. Lots of applications. Photo editing, CAD, Office applications. Instant messaging, email and web browsing applications. Gaming, video conferencing, diagraming and project management applications. Financial, programming, and database applications.
Second, there will be a "flash rendering" component available. Start with "gnash".
Third, QEMU will be able to run Intel binaries, where it is otherwise impossible. Indeed, I have used QEMU to run Wine.
The biggest risk item is running nVidia (and other) binary drivers. If the basic i/o with the box is sufficient, then this isn't a concern (for the target audience) either.
The reason that *I* won't be using one of these is that it provides no value proposition for me. But I may rework applications to run on this platform. A potential audience of millions or tens of millions, or, potentially a billion simply cannot be ignored.
Again, this is not a "Wintel" platform; from that perspective it fails. But that is not the target.
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
That's IN ADDITION to normal VGA. I live in Hong Kong, you can get used 14 or 15" CRT monitors free, people are throwing them out all over to get LCD screens. You can buy them in a PC junk shop for US$3. Bigger monitors ar absurdly cheap too if you have the deskspace.
The full specs of the PC are here. The video specs:
ATI Radeon 7000-M
33MHz 32-bit PCI
Internalized with 16MB DDR RAM buffers
Support VGA port & S-Video output
It's really small; weighs 650g, half the Mac Mini.
"How many billions in exports is the Wintel platform worth to China?"
That is fine for exports. China makes lots of stuff for export that it wouldn't sell in China. The difference is anything sold in China with an Intel or AMD CPU and Windows involves money leaving China. If it exported then it is a net gain.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The rationale that "I can just get a used computer for the same price so this product shouldn't exist" is retarded and I'm so sick of reading it. Selling used uniform equipment would be difficult and wouldn't scale. Please tell me where I can get 10,000 500 mhz celerons, 15 GB hard drive, same brand of 128 MB of RAM, same NIC, etc etc, all used, all the exact same model, all in great condition.
I do sidework where we have to worry about these kinds of things. After we find a good deal on parts we ask ourselves "Can this company supply us enough units if this product takes off?", "Is this company going to be around in 3 years?", "Are they going to be able to supply this exact product for the next 3 years?", and so forth. Long term supply of uniform parts is a HUGE deal to companies. If you interchange your parts haphazardly you will run into issues. Issues that cost money. Any money you saved by doing so will be lost in support costs.
Building a PC for your grandma and building a PC for 10,000 customers are two different ballparks. Every screwup, every tiny cost, every little bit is multiplied 10,000 times. But I suspect many on here don't understand that.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.