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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?
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/I ain't drinkin from that river!
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.
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.
What if you want to store lots of MP3s, run a small web server, do software development, play movies, etc.? I was happily running on a fairly similar laptop (okay, 1 ghz CPU) until a few weeks ago. It ran linux quite well... if you can afford the latest-and-greatest to run your high-powered apps, that's great, but if not an older system works pretty well even for a lot of resource-intensive tasks.
My bicyles
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?
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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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
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.
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.