China to Make $125 PCs

TechFreep writes "A Chinese computer company hopes to sell low-cost PCs to schools and government agencies, but allegations of ripped-off processor designs might slow the effort. From the article: 'Chinese-based ZhongKe Menglan Electronics Technology Co. will produce several thousand low-cost PCs to distribute to schools and local governments. The PCs, which will initially sell for $150 to $175, will run on Linux and include 256Mb of RAM, a 40 or 60GB hard drive, and a Godson-2 CPU clocked between 800Mhz and 1Ghz. If initial sales of the product are successful ZhongKe will begin mass production of the units for sale at around 125 US dollars. However, the Godson-2 CPU included in the PCs has come under scrutiny of late. BLX IC Design Corp., producer of the Godson-2, produced its first working prototype in 2005. The chip clocked at 500Mhz, and BLX at the time claimed the Godson's performance rivaled that of higher-clocked Pentium III CPUs. However, the chip's architecture has gotten attention around the industry for its similarities to the MIPS chip from MIPS Technologies Inc. According to market research group In-Stat, the Godson-2 is about 95 percent compatible with the MIPS R10000, which was introduced in 1995.'"

Comments

MIPS patents?

[tepples]

Plasma implements the MIPS architecture minuses the patented parts. Could the Godson CPU be a variant of this?

Re:MIPS patents?

[pchan-]

The MIPS architecture is a popular one with people who implement their own cores. In fact, it is rather common for computer science/engineering students to implement their own using FPGAs, based on the commonly used Computer Architecture by Hennessy and Patterson. The architecture is extremely simple, straightforward, and easy to implement.

I believe you can implemented a near complete MIPS R3000 core with only minor differences and avoid any patent issues (as long as you don't call it a MIPS). Some of the ops on the newer cores are still encumbered and cannot be implemented without paying money to MIPS Technologies. I've worked with a couple of MIPS clones, some by American companies, and there is nothing illegal about them. In fact, it would be far more surprising if the Chinese companies wasted the time creating their own architecture instead of basing it on a proven one.

Re:MIPS patents?

[spamchang]

MIPS isn't such a common architecture to teach students anymore, imho. Most schools teach x86 assembly (Caltech, for one) instead of MIPS assembly. But you may be one of the fortunates who go to school where Hennessy is president, so you may have learned MIPS there =P

Re:MIPS patents?

[Jason Earl]

One thing is certain. Microsoft can't pretend that these Linux computers are going to end up running Windows.

Re:MIPS patents?

[qbwiz]

It's not too terrible to program an x86 in assembly (all those extra instructions can sometimes come in handy, in a way), but I'd really rather not implement an x86. The instruction decoder alone would take ages to work out.

Re:MIPS patents?

[poopie]

One thing is certain. Microsoft can't pretend that these Linux computers are going to end up running Windows

There *IS* Windows NT 3.51 for MIPS...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT

We had NEC MIPS servers running it way back when.

Re:MIPS patents?

[Jason Earl]

Yes, I remember Windows NT for MIPS. That hardly means that you can buy such a beast today. Even if you could buy NT for MIPs what are the chances of it running on something that is 95% compatible?

Besides, what sort of freakshow would rather run Windows NT 3.51 on MIPs over Linux? The most sophisticated piece of software that is likely to run on such a system is notepad.exe.

Re:MIPS patents?

[PAPPP]

It's worth noting that the patent most likely to be stepped on in dealing with MIPS is US patent 4,814,976, which covers the unaligned load/store instructions lwl, lwr, swl and swr. This patent expires 2006-12-26, which won't be long now. Google for "Lexra" "MIPS" and "Patent" for details of the various spats over the patent.
Apparently some of the more recent extensions fall under other patents, but the basic archetecture will be entirely unencumbered after this one expires. And as a Computer Enginering student I can tell you as ISAs go it's far and away the easiest useful one to impliment.

Re:MIPS patents?

[pchan-]

But you may be one of the fortunates who go to school where Hennessy is president, so you may have learned MIPS there =P

I take it you mean Stanford. I went to UCLA, but many people I've met from different schools in the US have used the same architecture book. I'm talking about computer architecture, not just assembly language. The complexity of the x86 processors is far too great to teach them to undergrads. However, in about a hundred hours of work, one lab partner and I were able to construct a working MIPS-architecture CPU (on a Xilinx FPGA) starting with nothing but gates, flipflops, and other basic elements.

Now, since you know x86 assembly, let me teach you MIPS assembly in one minute:
32 registers, r0-r31. r0 is hardcoded to zero. jal/bal (jump/branch and link) push the PC to r31. otherwise, all registers are equal.

li rD VAL ; load to register rD (destination) immediate value VAL
lw rD rS ; load word at address stored in rS (source) to
add/sub/... rD rA rB ; perform op on registers A and B, store to register D
sw rD rS ; store word at rD to address in rS

You'll be doing a lot of load/stores. The instruction after a branch statement gets executed even if the branch is called. The rest is just details (extend to half-words and bytes at your convenience). There are no index registers, no flags, no predicates, nothing. Congratulations, you are now qualified to program a MIPS processor.

Re:MIPS patents?

[AuMatar]

Many don't- UIUC teaches MIPs asm to CS students (and x86 to the comp engs). But just about every school teaches processor design on MIPs- x86 is just too difficult to design a decoder for in 1 semester.

Re:MIPS patents?

[JohnFluxx]

We did the arm chip which I think is very very similar (it all being RISC and all). But that's not surprising since it was our professor that designed and made the arm chip in the first place :-)

Re:MIPS patents?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't they just use OpenSPARC (http://opensparc.net/) ?

Re:MIPS patents?

[Anonymous Coward]

But you may be one of the fortunates who go to school where Hennessy is president, so you may have learned MIPS there =P

Hennessy? President? You can forget that...

Where I went to school, Courvoisier was king. :-)

Re:MIPS patents?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is still the MMP patent portfolio for variable clocks. I doubt that they found a way around that concept in a 500 MHz system and Patriot Scientific + TPL will sure knock on the door when enough systems are delivered. Could be that the Chinese have stronger knees than the Japanese.

Ernst

Re:MIPS patents?

[jamar0303]

Well of course they do- where do your iPods and stuff come from? China, most likely. They could threaten to cut off that manufacturing and America's cheap stuff all goes away (not that it's a bad thing- Wal-Mart would go away too).

Re:MIPS patents?

[IamTheRealMike]

Hey, that's pretty cool, thanks :) One thing that did surprise me is that the instruction after a branch is always executed. What's up with that? Does that mean in practice after a branch there is always a no-op?

Re:MIPS patents?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it didn't exist when this CPU was created.

Re:MIPS patents?

[Jamie Lokier]

No, often you can find an instruction to put after the branch. Sparc is the same. It's called the "branch delay slot", and it's a way of reducing the pipeline flush penalty.

Re:MIPS patents?

[Chemicalscum]

Besides, what sort of freakshow would rather run Windows NT 3.51 on MIPs over Linux? The most sophisticated piece of software that is likely to run on such a system is notepad.exe.

There is always someone who will do it and when asked why will reply:

"bacause I can!"

Re:MIPS patents?

[ajs318]

I would have thought ARM {pre-Thumb} would be about the simplest processor to implement. Basically, at its heart is a matrix of AND-OR selection logic, which allows you to do cool stuff like shifting and crementing on the way in and out. Bits within the opcode determine directly which operation to perform, the source and destination registers, any shifting, pre/post in/decrements, the order of operands {only the physically-second operand can be munged; but for non-commutive operations like subtractions, the logical order is reversible. SBCS R0, R2, R1 can be written as RSCS R0, R1, R2}, the conditionality {every ARM instruction is conditional, though there is an "ALWAYS" condition and even a "NEVER" condition whose use is deprectated} and whether or not to update the condition flags from the current instruction. There's only one branch instruction, which simply stores the return address in a register. You can build an ARM clone out of 74HC TTL ICs {which is what Steve Furber and Sophie [then Roger] Wilson actually did, after proving the instruction set on an emulator based around an expanded BBC Model B}. The logic is obvious from the instruction set, so you certainly won't be violating any trade secrets; and you can change enough details to get around any patent issues without affecting the functionality much {invert the sense of one of the condition code bits?}.

ARM is also inherently low-power, providing plenty of instructions per joule.

Re:MIPS patents?

[bobintetley]

There are no index registers, no flags, no predicates, nothing.

Not that I've done any assembly for a while, but without flags how can you perform comparisons (eg: 6502 uses the zero flag for equality in comparisons) and how do you know whether a subtraction/addition operation has overflowed the register without a carry flag? What about conditional branching?

That aside, MIPS looks like a very elegant architecture (x86 is just nasty).

Re:MIPS patents?

[ThePhilips]

MIPS isn't such a common architecture to teach students anymore, imho.

You miss the point. It's not about software - it's about hardware. Even my friends electronic engineering students once implemented on FPGA core of MIPS plus few Ks of RAM.

x86 isn't so easy to implement due to variable op length and vast number of commands.

ARM, MIPS and now PowerPC is more or less standard examples of CPU designs students can try to implement by themselves during classes.

Well, you can't run M$Windows on them - but some talented kids manage to squeeze NetBSD/Linux in.

Re:MIPS patents?

[Hal_Porter]

You can build an ARM clone out of 74HC TTL ICs {which is what Steve Furber and Sophie [then Roger] Wilson actually did, after proving the instruction set on an emulator based around an expanded BBC Model
B}

Never knew that Sophie Wilson had a sex change.

Does that mean that you can credit the ARM as a female co-designed architecture or not?

Re:MIPS patents?

[AJWM]

x86 is just too difficult to design a decoder for in 1 semester.

Nah, you just do the core of the decoder as MIPS and then implement the x86 instruction set in software (microcode). ;-)

Re:MIPS patents?

[Hal_Porter]

In early, in order non superscalar, Risc chips branch delay slots are natural, since the instruction following the branch has almost completed execution by the time the branch is taken.

Later chips, notable Alpha, don't do this because the number of natural branch delay slots would vary with implementation. To avoid it, you need to add logic to stall the pipeline until the branch result is known. The idea behind MIPS was to build a simple processor without this logic that could be clocked at enormous frequencies - the original acronym was "Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages".

It's not really a problem, the compiler can usually schedule an instruction there, and if not the NOP doesn't take any time to execute.

Re:MIPS patents?

[ajs318]

That depends entirely upon whether you consider a transsexual as a lifelong (woman|man) who was born bearing a greater resemblance to a (boy|girl), or a former (man|woman) who was changed into a (woman|man) by surgery. And that's really their own business anyway.

[Rationale for ordering of gender-specific nouns: there are numerically more male-to-female transsexuals than female-to-male, therefore the earlier form is statistically more likely to be correct.]

Re:MIPS patents?

[drinkypoo]

How did this get marked troll? A quick google would tell you that caltech does indeed deal with x86. Anyway I think it makes more sense to learn on x86 instead of MIPS, which is indeed still used in many many places; MIPS may be better and easier, but that's exactly why you should learn on x86. After that, everything else is easier.

Re:MIPS patents?

[david.given]

Not that I've done any assembly for a while, but without flags how can you perform comparisons (eg: 6502 uses the zero flag for equality in comparisons) and how do you know whether a subtraction/addition operation has overflowed the register without a carry flag? What about conditional branching?

No flags, no overflows. Branching is easy:

beq r2, r3, label

Branch to label if r2 == r3. There are a bunch of other branch instructions for the other conditionals, too. All incredibly elegant and easy to use; better, dare I say it, than ARM, although with less scope for doing neat things with the condition codes.

Re:MIPS patents?

[nurb432]

There was also an early form of nt4 for mips, alpha and ( i think ) sparc. Not sure if it ever got sold as a product, but i had it in an msdn set ages ago.

Re:MIPS patents?

[Jason Earl]

That's a good point. I've done that sort of thing myself a time or two. Not with Windows, though. I get no joy out of running Windows.

You certainly aren't going to be able to sell Windows NT 3.51 on Godson to consumers, though.

Re:MIPS patents?

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC it came with IE. I don't know on what kind of MIPS it ran. TBH I'd like to know. Even NT4 was available for MIPS IIRC. I had this Windows NT 4 CD and it clearly said "x86, MIPS, Alpha, POWER". I used it on Alpha, with IE. That is all I remember well :) so probably more than notepad.exe, in theory you could even compile Firefox for it etc, or perhaps ReactOS would run on it? I got your point though. Would be a 'fun' project..

Re:MIPS patents?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope not SPARC.

POWER or PowerPC. That was all the hype when NT4 came out.

The Alpha port was discontinued during development of Windows 2000. There's some kind of beta of that for Alpha. Thats as far as it goes. Perhaps ReactOS would run though? It depends on WINE though (at least partly?)

Re:MIPS patents?

[EvilSporkMan]

The University of Michigan teaches MIPS assembly, though apparently we don't use it in the projects.

So what are we upset about?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Are we upset that some defunct chip designer isn't getting their cut? Or is it that the Chinese are making cheap computers for themselves instead of for us? Or maybe it's that the Chinese aren't outsourcing their production to the West?

I don't know what's the problem here. It sounds like a great idea to put as many people on the internet as cheaply as possible because more people means more information and more information transfer. Now Wang Chung in the sticks can be just as up to date with government propaganda as Chung King in Shanghai is.

Bruce Lee unavailable for comment.

Re:So what are we upset about?

[anagama]

Now Wang Chung in the sticks...

Everybody have fun tonight,
Everybody Wang Chung tonight ...

Re:So what are we upset about?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I'll ignore the racist tone of your comment (Wang Chung, Chung King, etc) - but MIPS is hardly a product of a defunct chip designer. I know, I work for them as a product engineer.

In fact, MIPS is the #1 architecture in several market segments, including:
Cable STB 76%
Satellite STB 30%
DVD Recorders 70%
Cable Modems 95%
Internet Backbone 40%
DSL 52%
WLAN 55%
VoIP 72%

See http://www.mips.com/ for more information on that.

-Bruce Chin

Re:So what are we upset about?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I see your MIPS and raise you an ARM

Re:So what are we upset about?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Assuming that you're actually serious, someone owns those designs - cheap PCs are a laudable goal, but that's no justification for ripping off a bunch of people.

Re:So what are we upset about?

[Anonymous Coward]

... who occupies mostly a different market segment (especially portable devices). Although ARM is trying to enter MIPS markets with a decent high-performance core (superscalar, 2-issue, inorder).

In general, the "MIPS is dying" meme is not quite right... (And no, I don't work for MIPS.)

The only threat for stuff like the Broadcom BCM1480 (quad-core, up to four IPC per core, quad-channel DDR2 memory controller) is really PowerPC, not ARM.

Re:So what are we upset about?

[the_humeister]

The summary states that the Godson-2 chip is 95% compatible with a R10000. That doesn't mean it's a direct copy of the R10000. It could just mean they use the 95% of the instructions that the R10000 uses (the ones that aren't patented). But without further details, we can't tell at this point.

Re:So what are we upset about?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

The implication in the article and the comment I responded to was that China ripped off the design and the comment I responded to implied that that was OK. Given China's history of playing fast and loose with IP, I find the implications plausible.

Re:So what are we upset about?

[Jason Earl]

Patent issues are only likely to be problematic if the Chinese try to sell these machines in the U.S. If they are for the Chinese market there really is very little that the MIPs folks can do, even if they are using MIPs patents.

As much as I would like to be able to get my hands on an inexpensive MIPs-alike Linux box I don't think this is going to be available in my neck of the woods anytime soon.

Re:So what are we upset about?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I can imagine that maybe Chinese designers considered just making a copy, but then deciding to work around applicable IP just in case they come up with something worth exporting.

Re:So what are we upset about?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Sheaper hardware for everyone is a nice thing.

This shows, yet again, that IP and monopolies are bad. Also it is an example of why china should choose to stay outside of international IT agreements, so that their companies are not affected by american patents. (btw. why would they be, even in europe it is required that you have european patents, us patents are not valid).

Is this MIPS architectyre really patented in china?

Re:So what are we upset about?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Chinese are already a big enough economic threat to the rest of us; they certainly don't need freebies. Besides, isn't it interesting how despite their "internationally competitive" universities, "brilliant minds" and "unlimited resources," they can't even design a relatively simple CPU without ripping off the West?

Personally, I find the prospect of a world economically dominated by China to be scary as all hell, and if you're European or American, you should too.

Oh, by the way, did you hear they're harvesting organs from (living) Falun Gong practitioners? I have no problem with Chinese people--but I fucking hate their country and everything it stands for.

Re:So what are we upset about?

[Noodlenose]

I have no problem with Chinese people--but I fucking hate their country and everything it stands for.

You're of course trolling, but your lacking maturity makes this acceptable.

Nevertheless there is nothing more abstract and idiotic to say "I hate this country". What do you hate? Is its rolling hills, its rivers or panda bears? Or might it be that you have a problem with Chinas government and its struggling reformist arm?

Well, you should say so. There are millions of trolls on Slashdot, but why not aspire to be a troll with something to say?

Re:So what are we upset about?

[Hal_Porter]

Intel do some pretty beefy ARM compatibles.

800Mhz, 333Mhz FSB.

http://www.intel.com/design/iio/iop333.htm

It's still in order, no SMT, but I reckon most embedded applications can live with that.

Re:So what are we upset about?

[Anonymous Coward]

A poster who knows what he is talking about would more clearly specify whether he or she is talking about "patent infringement", "copyright infringement", "trademark infringement" or some other cause of action. The parent poster appears to be trying to cover his or her ignorance by hiding behind ill-defined terminology like "ripped off" "playing fast and loose with IP."

It is essential to the efficient functioning of a competitive economy that producers copy each others ideas against each others will.

Re:So what are we upset about?

[AchilleTalon]

Isn't China government itself being a monopoly and chinese company stated controlled?

I find your point a little bit ironic.

Re:So what are we upset about?

[M1FCJ]

I hate those friggin' pandas and their ability to turn into Saotome Genma every time they go into a hot water bath/lake!

If I can't turn into an innocent panda every time my boss asks about my slipping deadlines, I can't see why someone else should!

Re:So what are we upset about?

[AchilleTalon]

Should have written:

Isn't China government itself being a monopoly and chinese companies State controlled?

I find your point a little bit ironic.

Re:So what are we upset about?

[RAMMS EIN]

``The Chinese are already a big enough economic threat to the rest of us;''

What makes you think that? China's economic boom is due to it being beneficial both to China and to its trade partners. After all, if it weren't beneficial to them, why would they engage in the trade?

``they certainly don't need freebies. Besides, isn't it interesting how despite their "internationally competitive" universities, "brilliant minds" and "unlimited resources," they can't even design a relatively simple CPU without ripping off the West?''

Who says they couldn't have? I'm sure they could have, but the way they have chosen has a number of advantages. First of all, it saves the design costs (remember they are using this to make _cheap_ computers) and, secondly, it will be compatible with existing software (which, again, saves costs). I am happy to see people choosing to re-use something that already exists instead of inventing their own out of NIH syndrome, for once.

``Personally, I find the prospect of a world economically dominated by China to be scary as all hell, and if you're European or American, you should too.''

Just because China has the fastest growing economy in the world doesn't mean they will become economically dominating. The major reason for their economy growing so fast is that it's playing catch-up: we're outsourcing work (mostly manufacturing) to China because labor is cheap there. With the arrival of these jobs, wages will go up and labor won't be as cheap anymore - eventually the process will slow down.

Of course, there are other incentives, such as China being a huge market and having relaxed laws w.r.t. people's rights and the environment. We can have a huge market, too, if we quit posting guards at the borders collecting import/export fees and protecting our local industries. People's rights and protection of the environment will come to China eventually, once people have the luxury of caring about them (you need to eat, first) and once things get bad enough. Just like it happened in Europe in the twentieth century.

``Oh, by the way, did you hear they're harvesting organs from (living) Falun Gong practitioners? I have no problem with Chinese people--but I fucking hate their country and everything it stands for.''

China is a huge country with a huge government apparatus. Not everybody in the government is moving in the same direction. They're repressing criticism and taking people's land at the same time as creating better opportunities for economic growth and education. It will get better; give it some time. Europe didn't get rid of its tyrants overnight, either.

By the way, did _you_ know that the USA has been invading sovereign countries under false pretenses and without provocation, and that many European countries have been complicit or even supporting? I don't know where you are from, but I'm sure your country isn't all that innocent, either.

Re:So what are we upset about?

[hey!]

but that's no justification for ripping off a bunch of people.

Actually intellecutal property "owners" don't really have a fundamental expectation of having the same monopoly on ideas in other countries that the do in their own.

China, however, is a WIPO country. If these guys are cheating with the collusion of the Chinese government, the government may be reneging on its commitments; theyh would be getting protection for their inventors without affording equal protection to foreign inventors. On the other hand, even if the Chinese are not strictly cheating, it is still possible that they may interpret each individual case more loosely.

Re:So what are we upset about?

[Jamie Lokier]

A practical difference between MIPS and ARM is that there are a number of MIPS clones which don't have to license anything from MIPS, provided they leave out the patented instructions. Whereas, cloning an ARM gets lots of hassle from ARM Ltd. Even just writing a software simulator for ARM is a problem(!) - this is why Qemu only emulates old ARMs.

So if someone's going to implement one of those instruction sets, it will tend to be MIPS if they're designing their own chip, and either of them if they're buying a pre-designed core.

Re:So what are we upset about?

[AmberBlackCat]

Assuming that you're actually serious, someone owns those designs - cheap PCs are a laudable goal, but that's no justification for ripping off a bunch of people.

That's going to come back to haunt you when the conversation turns to DRM.

Re:So what are we upset about?

[aminorex]

I read your comments to mean that if someone is chinese, then they are guilty until proven innocent. Seems like a classic definition of racial bigotry to me.

Re:So what are we upset about?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

I promise not to steal anybody's DRM implementation.

Re:So what are we upset about?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

If someone is in a Chinese company building a MIPS like chip, then any allegations of Copyright/trademark infringement are more plausible due to China's past behavior. That ain't racist.

Re:So what are we upset about?

[hackus]

Ripping people off?

You mean ripping people off that are not even born yet by extending patents and copyrights out to 100 years for example?

As far as I am concerned, the entire patent/copyright process as defined by the USA is nothing but a big boys club specifically designed to seal markets and prevent "disruptive" technologies.

I wish the Chinese all the best.

-Hackus

hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

so my guess is the industry is angry cause designs were copied(can they be copyrighted?) and I imagine it violates many patents?

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

so my guess is the industry is angry cause designs were copied(can they be copyrighted?) and I imagine it violates many patents?

See the first post.

What's in a name?

[mr_neke]

I find it a little interesting that ZhongKe could be pronounced to sound like "shonky".

With any luck this doesn't actually reflect on the capabilities of their PCs...

Re:What's in a name?

[Anonymous Coward]

shonky isn't a word you stupid fucking faggot

Re:What's in a name?

[Anonymous Coward]

The actual pronunciation is even more amusing. ZhongKe () sounds a little bit like a Chinese'ified version of the work "Junk".

Interestingly enough, I was prompted to download some Url_ISAPI.dll file when i went to the site www.zhongke.com. What's up with that?

Re:What's in a name?

[poopie]

shonky isn't a word ...

Umm, apparently it sorta is a word, you shonky shonk!

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sho nk

Re:What's in a name?

[VirusEqualsVeryYes]

I thought the name was quite amusing. While the pronunciation of zhong1 ke1 sounds sort of like "junk" to English speakers, it actually translates roughly to "Central Technology". Talk about your subliminal messages :P

(Hmm, Slashdot doesn't accept Chinese characters. Bummer.)

Re:What's in a name?

[Anonymous Coward]

lol u looze

Why is this so hard?

[UbuntuDupe]

I seem to recall that 200 MHz and an 8 Gig hard drive was top of the line, some time during the 90's. Such computers seemed to handle word processing, web browsing, email, etc. just fine. What would those components cost now? Not very much because of miniaturization. A $125 computer should be no big deal right?

So how's that $100 PC coming along? WHAT?? Why do you need those kinds of specs?

Re:Why is this so hard?

[Anonymous Coward]

but there was no AQUA! WE NEED BRIGHT COLORS

in all honesty, something vintage windows 95/mac os 7.5 would serve 95% of people fine, but everyone's got to keep up with the joneses, so we now have 3GHZ machines doing powerpoints and word documents. How Wasteful!

Re:Why is this so hard?

[grumbel]

Such computers seemed to handle word processing, web browsing, email, etc.

Not when you want to use OpenOffice and Firefox. I am not sure if they really want to, but todays applications simply require quite a bit more CPU and RAM then yesterdays applications, even for the very same jobs. So unless they also write the low-spec software, they better make sure that they have enough power to run current days applications.

Re:Why is this so hard?

[mcrbids]

I seem to recall that 200 MHz and an 8 Gig hard drive was top of the line, some time during the 90's. Such computers seemed to handle word processing, web browsing, email, etc. just fine. What would those components cost now? Not very much because of miniaturization. A $125 computer should be no big deal right?


Don't forget the concept of the minimum cost of production.

It doesn't actually cost (much) more to produce a 300 GB HDD than an 8 GB HDD. You have the same basic amount of aluminum, wire, circuit boards, chips, solder joints, IDE connectors,etc in either case. It occupies the same amount of space, and still needs to be assembled, checked, packed, shipped, and accounted for.

All these things do not change regardless of the HDD capacity. At a certain point, these costs overtake the profit involved in manufacturing, so that it no longer even makes sense to manufacture the drive any longer. That today is somewheres around $75-100 per drive. (retail) This cost is dropping, and has continued to drop, but it's still there.

This is why a $300 computer today blows the doors off a computer built 5 years ago for $1000, but the 5 year old computer cannot be produced today for its relative value. (say, $125)

Re:Why is this so hard?

[ImaLamer]

I think "word processing" is a bit advanced for people who have never used PC's before. A simple text editor would be a revolution, people are still going to type (and somehow typing turns into economic upturn). After people have exhausted their use of the plain text editor (I like "Joe" for linux) and have move the society forward, they can get computers that support OpenOffice.

Besides, lightweight applications already exist. Even better, they are stable. Resurrect them!

Re:Why is this so hard?

[Ambidisastrous]

I'm using a $125 computer right now -- not the one in the article, just an older Toshiba laptop that someone was replacing. It came with Windows 2000, which I immediately replaced with Xubuntu. Firefox can be a little sluggish at times, but in general it works fine for everyday use.

As I recall, the OLPC $100 laptop was designed to not only be useful for Web browsing, programming, and general educational use, but also to serve as a wireless mesh node, wiki engine, and hammer if necessary. It's supposed to have a long battery life and a screen viewable in bright sunlight, be rechargeable without a connection to the power grid, and be unbreakable by even the mighty Kofi Annan. And it needs to be tiny and cute so that kids will like it and be able to carry it around. My $125 laptop can run Python and Gaim, but the battery is crap, and it has basically no peripherals without its docking station. Definitely not a solution for remote areas with intermittent utilities.

A side note: I have a deep appreciation for the many lightweight Linux distros out there. Switching from commercial operating systems is an excellent way to break out of the forced hardware upgrade cycle and salvage old machines.

Re:Why is this so hard?

[Sfing_ter]

ummm running Zenwalk 2.8 (current virgin), on a k62 500 with 192mb ram, run firefox and ooo no problem. Multi-taskin' my ASS off, (gaim, terminal, firefox and tbird, rdesktop and gftp all open at once) ....

Re:Why is this so hard?

[noidentity]

I am not sure if they really want to, but todays applications simply require quite a bit more CPU and RAM then yesterdays applications, even for the very same jobs.

They use quite a bit more CPU and RAM, but do they really require it? As in, maybe they could be written better. Of course, given that such CPU and RAM are cheap these days, it doesn't make sense to spend extra time reducing these requirements a lot.

Re:Why is this so hard?

[evilviper]

I seem to recall that 200 MHz and an 8 Gig hard drive was top of the line, some time during the 90's. Such computers seemed to handle word processing, web browsing, email, etc. just fine.

Yes, they ran Netscape 3.0 and Windows 95 just fine. Similar software today, however, is much better than it used-to be, which is why almost nobody uses that old software on their new computers.

Though, you aren't extremely far off. Something like a 400MHz P2 is fast enough for things like DVD playback, and most office apps if you don't mind a bit of waiting.

What would those components cost now? Not very much because of miniaturization.

There becomes a point when making a slower CPU, and a smaller (capacity) hard drive, just isn't any cheaper.

Maxtor tries to get around that by making their cheapest, 10-20GB 5400 rpm hard drives only half the height of normal 3.5" drives.

Now that's only NEW units. You can get some old surplus units pretty cheap, because they'll sell them at a loss to get them out of their wherehouse, but that's a limited supply, that's gone when it's gone.

With that said, for reasonably small quantities, you can put together many systems if you're willing to wait for surplus components to drop in price, but it wouldn't make much of a business. Someone ordering 500 systems wants to know what the clock speed of the CPU is, the type of motherboard, the brand and size of hard drive. You can't just say "You'll get whatever's available at the time". For larger companies, the added maintenance costs of systems with various parts outweighs that inital savings.

For individuals, though, it's pretty easy to piece together a multi-GHz system for a little over $100 (provided assembly time is free).

Re:Why is this so hard?

[ozmanjusri]

This is why a $300 computer today blows the doors off a computer built 5 years ago for $1000

Yep, increased performance at the same cost holds true for those components which are relatively mature in design, but still suited to incremental improvement. In computers, that's hard drives, RAM, CPUs and to some extent, mainboards. Other components which are fully mature in their niche, such as maths co-processors, soundcards and to a lesser extent, VGA and LAN adaptors get embedded into other components, which is where the real cost savings come from.

That modern $300 computer has a lot less parts than the equivalent previous generation $1000 item, and that's where I'd look to see ZhongKe making their savings. The computer may have 8GB storage for example, but it'll be flash ram embedded on the mainboard.

Re:Why is this so hard?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why a $300 computer today blows the doors off a computer built 5 years ago for $1000, but the 5 year old computer cannot be produced today for its relative value. (say, $125)

Except in China, where the costs of assembly, checking, packing and accounting are much less than in the west.

The decades-long cycle of economic growth, with the associated increase in standards of living, inflation etc has got us into thinking that for $125 you can not do much. But for a Chinese worker it is still a fortune.

Re:Why is this so hard?

[drsquare]

Yes, they ran Netscape 3.0 and Windows 95 just fine. Similar software today, however, is much better than it used-to be, which is why almost nobody uses that old software on their new computers.

Is the software really better? Compare the system requirements for Word XP to Word 95, and tell me how much extra functionality it really has. People upgraded from Windows 95 because it crashed so often, not because the newer versions had more functionality.

Re:Why is this so hard?

[Tim C]

So how's that $100 PC coming along? WHAT?? Why do you need those kinds of specs?

Because without those specs, I can't use my PC for what I want to use it for. We don't all just surf, email, and fire up vi occasionally.

Re:Why is this so hard?

[spectrumCoder]

I think the above post is a good point, not flamebait. There is a place for simple, streamlined software that anyone can figure out how to use, and the perfect place for it is on a $125 PC. OpenOffice and Firefox are not simple, and not streamlined. There's no point someone having an expensive PC (by which I mean $400+) running these apps if the user doesn't want to or doesn't know how to utilize them fully.

There is plenty of software that can perform the same basic internet and office tasks while using far less CPU cycles and memory. How else could my mobile phone be capable of browsing xhtml web pages?

Re:Why is this so hard?

[Yvanhoe]

I think it costs roughly the same to produce a 200 Gigs HD than a 1 Gig one, that's why we don't see many 50$ PC "top of the line 20 years ago". You can find used computers, but you cannot find new ones with low specs.

Now imagine, you can produce 1Go disks for $20 or 100Go for $30, which one would make more sense for your business ?

Re:Why is this so hard?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with vintage equipment is that when something goes wrong you're on your own and shit outta luck. That gets real old real fast.

Re:Why is this so hard?

[Denial93]

I spent months on a 700MHz Duron with 128(!) megs of RAM translating a 400+ pages book in OOo, occasionally switching to the Firefox window for some relaxing browsing, with WinAmp constantly running. No complaints, it ran like a charm (except when I saved to the ancient 8GB hard drive). I can see how image and sound editing wouldn't be fun on this kind of machine, and how decoding MPEG4 on it just doesn't work, but OOo and Firefox absolutely are not a problem.

This is even more true when you don't need all the OS overhead I had in the above scenario, using Win2000 i.e. requiring malware protection etc.

Re:Why is this so hard?

[AchilleTalon]

Still using my PIII 750MHz 256MB laptop with Linux, Gnome, Firefox, Abiword, Gnumeric, Acrobat reader and few others without any problem.

Todays computers are so powerful, even OS developers are seeking at new things they can include in the OS to waste CPU and memory resources to provide eye-candies.

Re:Why is this so hard?

[sorak]

I seem to recall that 200 MHz and an 8 Gig hard drive was top of the line, some time during the 90's. Such computers seemed to handle word processing, web browsing, email, etc. just fine. What would those components cost now? Not very much because of miniaturization. A $125 computer should be no big deal right?

Inflation doesn't just happen in economics. I had a 300Mhz k6-2 until about 4 years ago, and one thing I noticed is that, when it was brand new, it could run my favorite mp3 ripper/player, and a web browser, and still have enough resources to handle most of what I threw at it. Toward the end, it couldn't even play MP3s, because the mp3 ripper/player kept making forced updates, and released a version that took far more resources to accomplish the same task. Sure, it looked better, but it couldn't do anything useful on a 300MHz.

Anyway, the point is that if you can dig up yesterday's software, then you can use yesterday's technology to accomplish what people were doing, back in the day. But, if you try to use modern software releases, you will find that you need a more powerful system just to handle tasks people have been doing for the past twenty years.

Re:Why is this so hard?

[evilviper]

People upgraded from Windows 95 because it crashed so often, not because the newer versions had more functionality.

I didn't say more features, I said "much better than it used-to be", which you quoted correctly, and still doesn't seem to have registered with you.

Re:Why is this so hard?

[ajs318]

If it comes up in metamoderation, I promise I'll M2 that "Flamebait" unfair.

Firefox and OpenOffice can trace their lineage directly back to closed-source software (Netscape Navigator and StarOffice respectively). As such, they contain many examples of lousy programming practice, simply because nobody ever thought that code would see the light of day. That's just what you get when you set more store by "on time" than you set by "right". Look at alternative browsers and office applications to see how unbloated they can be made. In defence to the Mozilla people, it is possible to reduce the size of Firefox if you know what you're doing; DSL managed to get a very small executable that they can still call Firefox. OpenOffice really needs doing again from scratch, though.

Re:Why is this so hard?

[flyingfsck]

Huh? I ran OpenOffice, Firefox and KDE on my 600MHz Stinkpad with 256MB RAM. Worked fine. Would still have worked fine if some asshat didn't steal it.

Re:Why is this so hard?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok then if the features are generally the same define 'much better'?

Re:Why is this so hard?

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox can be a little sluggish at times, but in general it works fine for everyday use.

Firefox is sluggish on my quad Opteron, with 4 GB of RAM, running Xubuntu. Konqueror is a far more sleek and fast browser, and actually fits in better than Firefox with the simple, efficient ideology of XFCE.

hmmm...

[RuBLed]

If all of China supports this initiative, we might have for ourselves another competitive processor maker, ZMET.

I wonder how long before they catch up with the "core" race...

Re:hmmm...

[WindBourne]

Actually, it would require less than 5% to make it a viable competitor.

American retailers not much more

[davidwr]

I've seen several "house brand" PCs from major retailers that ran under $250 with Windows and under $150 without when on "we do this almost every week" sales. Yes I know what "loss leader" means but at these prices the Linux boxes probably wholesale for $150-$175. Large school systems and other institutions would probably pay very close to wholesale.

Re:American retailers not much more

[WuphonsReach]

Hmm, $150 is a tough price point to hit for a regular PC if you're at all picky about components.

$45 CPU (AM2 Sempron 2800+, which means upgrade capability later)
$65 M/B (GeForce 6150 w/ integrated video)
$55 2x256 or 1x512MB (or $25 256MB single-stick)
$20 DVD-ROM
$25 Case+PSU
$45 Hard drive
===
$255

More like $300 once you buy a reasonably good case w/ PSU for $50-$75. And it would be expandable to put more memory and a more powerful CPU in it down the road.

You could still probably shave $100 off that price if you go for close-out deals, really cheap motherboards, older CPUs that are only $20ea, 256MB of RAM, and a really cheap case+PSU that will probably catch fire right after the warranty expires.

(The machines I'm building for work are around $500 for parts, but those are dual-core w/ 2GB RAM.)

Re:American retailers not much more

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

HP, Dell, Lenovo, and the like don't pay anywhere near retail price for components. Complete $250 PCs are common - with 256MB of DDR2, a Sempron 3400+, GeForce 6150 graphics, 80GB SATA drive, CD-ROM, flash card reader, and even a PCIe x16 slot.

I got a $150 eMachines PC - with a 17" monitor, 512MB of DDR, DVD/CD-RW combo drive, 80GB HDD, XP Home, and a 2.93GHz Celeron at Best Buy on Black Friday last year. It's not at all out of the question.

Re:American retailers not much more

[LaughingCoder]

Ummm, display, keyboard, mouse? Or perhaps this a machine you talk to and it talks back - in which case, speakers and microphone?

Re:American retailers not much more

[AJWM]

You're listing close to retail, quantity-one prices on those components. They'd be closer to half that in moderate volume wholesale.

Originality

[Pacifist Brawler]

At least they're ripping off something other than ix86.

Cheap computers for all

[HatchedEggs]

I really can't complain about the sentiment of wanting to provide computers for all. Why do I get the feeling though that the only reason the government wants to give people there access is so that they can find more ways to pull mone into Chinas society. Regardess, $150 PCs isnt suh a great deal.

We've all known MIT has been working on the $100 laptop project for some time. http://laptop.media.mit.edu/

A 500Mhx chip, etc... It might be inadequate for most programs that arent specifically made to work with it, but for a little more you'd think they could add some of those basic features to it and still undercut a $150 pricetag.

Re:Cheap computers for all

[cyfer2000]

The difference is buy selling the $150 computer, the Chinese company makes money, while by providing the $100 laptop, OLPC looses money, the other Chinese company makes money.

Bottom line, Chinese companies make money.

Try it with modern software.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can find a system like that today, try running some modern software on it. What you'll likely find is that certain software does run very well, but other software will be awfully slow for some reason.

I just tried this recently with Ubuntu 6.06, on a 266 MHz Pentium system with 128 MB of RAM. I encountered problems with some GNOME/GTK+ programs, notably Firefox. I'm not certain why, but it would take well over a minute to actually start up. This was with the GNOME desktop running, so I imagine many of the shared libraries it depends on would already have been in memory. Starting Firefox with GNOME started would also consume more than 128 MB of RAM, so swapping was encountered. This significantly slowed down the system.

I switched to KDE, and that did improve things somewhat. Konqueror would start fine, and it ran reasonably. I think this is because it all managed to stay within the 128 MB of physical RAM in the system, and thus swapping was mostly avoided.

I can't tell you why KDE ran so much quicker than the GNOME or GTK+ software I tried, but that's just how it worked. So while such systems may be cheap to produce today, and may have been able to perform many of today's tasks then, it's likely something that cannot be done with most modern software. If you do use modern software, you'll have to choose carefully, to find software that makes good use of the resources. In my case, I found that KDE did that, while GNOME did not. I don't know about Windows, or modern Windows software, so I can't tell you how well that'd work.

What about the $100 laptop?

[Modeski]

How will this affect the $100 laptop from Quanta? This Digitimes Systems article from August 31st talks about how they aim to ship ten million units during 2007:

Quanta will not categorize orders for the US$100 notebooks under its general notebook business, said Wang, noting that production for the US$100 laptop project will initially take place in Changshu, Jiangsu province (China), where Quanta mainly fulfills orders for its non-notebook products.

http://www.digitimes.com/systems/a20060831A2004.ht ml/

I know 10m is a global figure, but even so, I'm sure more than a few thousand (per the TechFreep article) of those would end up in Chinese schools.

Re:What about the $100 laptop?

[HatchedEggs]

The point wasn't that this is going to affect the 1 Laptop per child initiative.

It was that building a computer for relatively cheap (that still functions) is quite possible. I'm not very surprised that china can build $150 laptops... and the government will still make a healthy profit on it probably.

Re:What about the $100 laptop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonder if I can my company to sign up to a one laptop per engineer - I spend about 3 days out of 5 either in meetings or offsite (or both) and so far its taken: four forms, threee directors, alot of phone calls to even get the request approved. Now its a 6 week wait while our IT outsourcing company actually get around to providing it. (And knowing them it will be missing everything my desktop has or won't work first time etc).

Re:What about the $100 laptop?

[antime]

If this is the same machine that was demoed earlier this year it's not a laptop.

On a lighter note

[OldManAndTheC]

The system will come bundled with lots of open-source software, including the famous Radiant Dragon Pearl 2.0, which is known as the Perl of China, written by Won Ton, who is known as the Larry Wall of China.

Re:On a lighter note

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you meant to write "known as the Great Larry Wall of China" :-)

95% compatibility?

[Phiu-x]

My take: Instriial espionnage at its finest.

Re:95% compatibility?

[shadow_slicer]

'Instriial espionnage' is not needed. The MIPS instruction set and architecture are standard reading for anybody in the field. They're not saying they copied the layout or instruction set, it's more like the API.

All processors have a language they understand, a sequence of bits that have an arbitrary meaning to them. And these are usually published far and wide, so that people can write compilers and operating systems and assemblers for this processor. MIPS in particular is very popular to study because the simple structure makes it possible for teachers to make creating a VHDL or Verilog implementation of a simplified MIPS instruction set into a half-semester project.
In fact I doubt their implementation is anywhere near the same caliber as the Pentium III implementation, even if they claim the same speed. What probably happened is they have access to more modern, smaller fabrication methods so they can cram more transistors into the pipeline. And even soft IP cores in FPGAs can hit 200MHz, so a well designed core could probably hit 500 MHz in an ASIC.

That being said, creating a full super-scalar CPU implementing even 95% of the MIPS 64-4 version of the instruction set in silicon is difficult. I was not familiar with this specification, but a quick search on google reveals that

The Mips R10000 is a dynamic superscalar microprocessor that implements the 64-bit Mips-4 Instruction Set Architecture. It fetches and decodes four instructions per cycle and dynamically issues them to five fully pipelined low-latency execution units. Instructions can be fetched and executed speculatively beyond branches. Instructions graduate in order upon completion. Although instructions execute out of order, the processor still provides sequential memory consistency and precise exception handling.The R10000 is designed for high performance, even in large real-world applications which have poor memory locality. With speculative execution, it calculates memory addresses and initiates cache refills early. Its hierarchical nonblocking memory system helps hide memory latency with two levels of set-associative, write-back caches.

This is a really beefy processor that was probably state of the art in its time. Of course that was over 10 years agos. Is it really so suprising China is only 10 years behind in chip design? After all aren't most of the chip fabrication facilities in east Asia? I'd imagine there would be quite a few people who after a few years decide they want to be on the other end of the process.

R & D

[Techman83]

We all know how much Research and Development costs when its a private company, it would be unfeasable to design something original and Initial cheap!

Chinese attitude towards Linux

[patio11]

"We were going to pirate it, but couldn't figure out how."

Re:Chinese attitude towards Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

hahahahaha .. now *that's* funny !! LOL

That's the volume?

[WoTG]

produce several thousand low-cost PCs
They're going to have a hard time making those CPUs cost effective if they're only doing a few thousand. I'm thinking that either something was lost in translation, or the $150 price is some estimate after sales ramp, or it's all calculated in that every wishy-washy government slush fund kind of way.

Anyone care to guess what fab technology they're using?

Re:That's the volume?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone care to guess what fab technology they're using?

string and a pinboard?

Re:That's the volume?

[oliderid]

These CPUs are already used in low-cost routers.

Anyway I've read the spec. But there aren't any screen :-). So you get a pretty box for $150 and then? I guess the real price is around $200 at least.

Olivier

Re:That's the volume?

[mgblst]

It is probably aimed at upgrading boxes for schools, and they can keep the screens, but get a pretty reasonable machine. There seems to be a glut of old monitors at the moment, I see them going every day for £10...everybody wants new lcd screens.

Why no ARM micro-desktops?

[diablo-d3]

With ARM's new Cortex-A8 processor, why haven't I been seeing more micro-desktops and power efficient laptops and whatever based around this technology?

Why is the processor seen as a ripped-off design?

[joeykiller]

In earlier coverage on Slashdot of this chip (see the initial announcement, the follow up and the announcement of a 64-bit variant), at least in the coverage of the 32-bit Dragon version of the chip, no one blamed the chinese for ripping of anything. I even remember someone saying that the MIPS specification were free to use for anyone, as long as they paid around $20 for access to the specs. What has happened since then, and what is different in this case from, say, AMD cloning til Intel instruction set?

The principal investigator of the Godson program, Hu Weiwu, have some colorful comparions to houses and bedrooms when he tries to explain why he means that the Godson-2 processor does not infringe on any patents or intellectual properties.

125$ is still unaffordable

[unclocked]

to most Chinese, and to most Indians too.

Re:125$ is still unaffordable

[808140]

It's far cheaper than what (the Chinese anyway) currently have to shell out for a computer system. It may not reach impoverished farmers in Guizhou province, but it will certainly increase the number of people who can afford a computer.

However, I anticipate that no one will buy it. Computers are too expensive for many Chinese to own personally, but "internet cafes" ("gaming cafe" would be a more accurate name) are plentiful and extremely cheap -- 2 or 3 yuan per hour is typical (that's about 25 - 30 cents US). PC gaming is huge in the PRC (consoles never really caught on), and that's what the vast majority of Chinese use their machines for -- that and chatting, mostly on QQ, which GAIM and friends do not support*.

The result is that most Chinese are routinely exposed to Windows, and worse, they're addicted to a wide variety of Windows-only software. While owning your own machine is certainly a nice perk, the question they will be asking themselves is, do I want to shell out 125 dollars for a machine that won't run any software I want, or do I want to suffer through not having my own machine, and buy a USB memory stick instead, and do all my computing at the local internet cafe?

My guess is that for the vast majority of Chinese, the latter will seem like a much sounder choice. A 125 dollar x86-compatible machine would be one thing, but if all it can run is Linux, the Chinese won't go for it. Linux penetration in China is virtually nil, except maybe in the government, but they're not the types that would buy 125 dollar, 500MHz desktops.

Thankfully, Chinese support is much better in Linux now than it used to be, but there are still no decent free Chinese fonts -- something that, as a Chinese speaker who uses Linux exclusively, I am very aware of. This company probably would think nothing of bundling MS's SimSun and SimHei fonts with their distribution, as they've thought nothing of using a rip off MIPS chip, but that would be copyright infringement and in my mind wrong. I personally use SimSun and SimHei, but I paid the MS tax when I bought my thinkpad with XP pre-installed (in China, no less). The $125 laptop doesn't come with a Windows license.

All in all, it looks like a bust. It's cool, though.

(*There have been a few attempts to port QQ to Linux, but Tencent adds features to the QQ protocol much too quickly to keep up. Lack of support for wanted features would make Linux seem broken, even though the real culprit is a complex, proprietary, binary protocol with built in obsolescence... but hey, they don't know that.)

Re:125$ is still unaffordable

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not quite true as the other replier responded. $125 is very cheap for most Chinese to buy a computer right now (people most likely spend $1200 for laptops and $800 for desktops there)but the problem is the operating system, like the other replier pointed out: very few Chinese are familiar with Linux and most Chinese computer users are quite dependent on Windows and all the MS applications, which would make the initial marketing and sale of this computer difficult, especially in large cities. But hey, the low cost computer/open source software bundle has to start there somewhere within this 1.3 billion population, hopefully from the country where people are more in need of cheap computers.

$125 still might be too expensive

[the_humeister]

This is especially when I can get a used computer with decent specifications (Pentium III, 1 GHz, etc) for approximately $25-$50 at the local surplus store.

Re:$125 still might be too expensive

[Deliveranc3]

A... Reliability A machine that's likely to fail is worth less than nothing, B Hardware standardization software actually set up to work with your hardware and a community of people using the same hadware (Teh Awsome!), also while the hardware isn't super powerful it probably has a lot of the functionality we'd expect usb2.0 instead of 1, pci-E slots (Same price as AGP 1 slots but nicer, PXE for the network, wireless, NCQ just tonnes of tiny little features that actually make a computer useful nowadays.

Re:$125 still might be too expensive

[MarkByers]

This is especially when I can get a used computer with decent specifications (Pentium III, 1 GHz, etc) for approximately $25-$50 at the local surplus store.

Now try buying a few hundred million used computers at your local surplus store and see if you can still get the same deal. China has a lot of people and buying computers from American second hand stores isn't really a feasible business plan for a company trying to make ground in the Chinese market.

Re:$125 still might be too expensive

[antime]

The Chinese also want to be independent of western technology. If the US government are afraid of using Lenovo laptops why would the Chinese be any less suspicious of American hardware? Also, homebuilt computers lets them tailor them to local requirements (Chinese writing, built-in censorware etc.)

Re:$125 still might be too expensive

[MightyYar]

The problem is that the Pentium III would run Windows. Who runs that? This new Chinese chip will run... something better.

</sarcasm>

Yet 256 megs is the operational point to use them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because windows is memory hogs does not mean the linux OS is.

512 megs just to turn over Vista. Linux right wm about 32meg.

Note using KDE or Gnome might be pushing it. At least linux can be slimed down.

Run on linux?

[Sfing_ter]

Daaaaaaaamn, we're so backwards, our computers in the US still run on electricity...
Ba Da Dummmm, we'll be here til Friday, try the salmon.

Re:Why is the processor seen as a ripped-off desig

[evilviper]

no one blamed the chinese for ripping of anything.

You're kidding, right? Did you actually look through those comments? There are numerous accusations.

and what is different in this case from, say, AMD cloning til Intel instruction set?

AMD didn't just say one day "We're going to clone Intel chips". They had a contract with Intel, which allowed them to use both the instruction set, and the architecture of Intel's x86 chips. Intel did that because IBM demanded a chip with a second supplier.

AMD went to court with the issue, and secured their rights to use the instruction set, although not the actual same chip architecture.

In more recent years, Intel licenses all of their patents on this, so you just have to pay them a fee for it. AMD also has a lot of tech that Intel wants to use, so there has been extensive cross-licensing between the two.

he tries to explain why he means that the Godson-2 processor does not infringe on any patents or intellectual properties.

When the Chinese government tells you to say something, YOU SAY IT.

China is constantly running afoul of international copyright and patent laws, and they always deny it, even when the evidence is overwhelming.

It doesn't really matter...

[Belial6]

It doesn't really matter how hard it is to hit the $150 price point. Fry's electronics does it all the time. They have an add in their flyer just about every week for a brand spanking new x86 PC for $150.

XBox

[kyb]

XBox: Intel Celeron 733 MHz CPU, nVidia GeForce 3MX, 64 MB of RAM, 10 GB hard disk, a DVD drive and 10/100 Ethernet.
Cost new: $125

So there's already a 125$ pc that can run linux in the mass market here for $125. The specs aren't quite as good as the chinese one, but it is quite a few years old now, and has a well known intel processor and graphics accelerator.

kyb

Re:XBox

[RAMMS EIN]

``it is quite a few years old now, and has a well known intel processor and graphics accelerator.''

As well as the power of Microsoft who will _not_ be pleased if you use the Xbox as a cheap Linux PC. Might be better of buying Nintendo DS or PS/2, but oh no, they are Japanese!

Re:XBox

[evilviper]

So there's already a 125$ pc that can run linux

How do you run Linux without a keyboard or mouse? They aren't free, you realize.

A 10GB hard drive is also rather modest, and your exansion capabilities are incredibly limited, likely making it cheaper to buy a more expensive PC, if you need to add ANYTHING that isn't stock.

Re:XBox

[AJWM]

How do you run Linux without a keyboard or mouse? They aren't free, you realize.

No, but they're cheap. I just picked up a couple of keyboards and some mice, new retail, for $3.99 ea for the keyboards, $1.49 ea for the mice (at MicroCenter). Admittedly not the best quality, but they do the job. (Replacements for my young kids' computers in my case.)

Re:XBox

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that $125 price is at a loss. They plan to make their money on the games you buy for the XBox. Just like how printers are dirt cheap, but they make their profit off of the ink.

Leave It To China.....

[IHC Navistar]

.....to clone American technology, and then pass it off as their own.

-----

For Sale: One (1) genuine Soviet-made Iraqi AK-47 automatic rifle. Never fired. Dropped once.

But see your problem

[Sycraft-fu]

Is that as you said, you are being picky about components. I take it you've little experience with really cheap Chinese goods. They are cheap in both senses of the word. The idea is bottom dollar and to hell with quality.

I've a feeling this PC will follow along those lines. I mean please note that your system has a vastly more powerful CPU (with upgrade path as you noted) a real GPU, double the memory and so on. This is not an equal comparison. Also I'm going to guess that all the components will be the most minimal construction possible. Cheapest caps, most basic boards, etc. Anything to cut cost.

So ya, these'll beat essentially anything on the American market in the new sector, but then I imagine they'll be less quality than even the most bargain basement PCs. Don't expect this to be some revolution here. China also produces some amazingly cheap cars, but you really don't want to be in an accident in one. There is only so much cost you can cut before you must cut features to make it cheaper.

Re:But see your problem

[WuphonsReach]

I've watched enough folks over the years go with the absolute cheapest parts they could find. Then I get to watch them struggle later on with either stability issues (if not outright parts failures) or upgrades (if the machine survives past a year or two). I've even done it myself on occasion, thinking that it's worth saving $10 now only to have it come around and bite me a year down the road. Upgrades are the main reason why I avoid cheaper / proprietary solutions from the pre-built folks. With commodity parts, you can usually re-use numerous components in the next-gen system.

So now I tend to go for the middle-tier parts. Motherboards from companies like Asus, Gigabyte, MSI. Power-supplies from good brands. HDs with the 3-yr or 5-yr warranty. Well-designed cases that designed for cooling and noise reduction (Antec, Lian Li, Thermaltake, etc.).

Still, it looks like I can build a pretty decent system for $300. Bottom-end performance, but definitely good enough to run a Linux distro and do word-processing / web-browsing / e-mail. That gets my geek blood pumping as I consider the possibilities. And it's a machine that I wouldn't be ashamed to give someone.

Re:Why is the processor seen as a ripped-off desig

[joeykiller]

You're kidding, right? Did you actually look through those comments? There are numerous accusations.

I admit that I wasn't clear on what I meant -- I didn't think about the comments, but about the wording in the lead text.

China is constantly running afoul of international copyright and patent laws, and they always deny it, even when the evidence is overwhelming.

I know this, and I didn't mean to present Hu's words as evidence of anything. I just thought he used some colorful (and funny) metaphors when trying to explain that they're innocent :-)

the kernel?

[xoundmind]

So these chips are 95% compatible with MIPS? What exactly does that mean? What did they do, grab the entire Debian MIPS project and hack it from there? If so, wouldn't the GPL require the code to be released? (Yeah, I know, I wondering whether the Chinese government is willing to respect the GPL.)

Re:the kernel?

[xoundmind]

To put it another way: Either these are MIPS or they are not. If not, when exactly did the kernel become a dating service, where 95% compatability is astounding? So now the kernel supports a another architecture? That would seem to be big news.

Re:the kernel?

[Anonymous Coward]

What was that thing again called. IBM-compatible? Was it fully compatible? If Linux/MIPS runs on it out of the box (or will) then it can just be in the same family. Linux/MIPS won't be usable on all MIPS anyway just like Windows NT/MIPS isn't. OTOH seems AMD64 is sth diff than x64 or x86-64 (I don't get it tbh) its fractured or sth?

Mips.. 1995

[nurb432]

If it is similar to a 20 year old processor that pretty much implenents what is considerd standard RISC anyway, who cares?

Sounds great, I hope it runs better than ...

[SlashSquatch]

their motorcycles.

I wonder if we'll see them in yard sales throughout the Southern States.

In related news

[BlueNeutrino]

Chinese courts to use computers to decide who should face death sentence

$125 represents what?

[gelfling]

How much of the cost is the CPU? It would seem that it's not very large though every little bit helps. I'm guessing the cost of a Via C3 is pretty cheap too. And since there appears to be very little marketing cost, customization, mostly free software, little packagings and limited post sales support then $125 seems reasonable. How much of an average person's monthly income is that, anyway? And for what it's worth the Fortune 10 company I work for has cut back on 'standard' desktops to the point where anyone with 900Mhz or more won't be getting any upgrade/replacements any time in the future. If you have a need for more you have to demonstrate it and we run office software that's a lot bulkier than most.

Likely vs Unlikely

[kahei]

allegations of ripped-off processor designs

There are bound to be such allegations, and they're usually well founded.

might slow the effort.

Hee hee :) Now surely you jest!

10+ year old tech?

[LoudMusic]

Shouldn't there be a cutoff on old computer technology patents? With the rate of 'innovation' the old stuff isn't being used / developed anymore and some people could make use of its outrageously cheaper solutions. This is a perfect example. These people aren't going to be able to afford anything that is currently selling so let someone make out of production parts for cheap computers that these consumers can actually afford. It's obvious Intel / IBM / AMD / etc don't care about the uber cheap markets.

Re:10+ year old tech?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's obvious Intel / IBM / AMD / etc don't care about the uber cheap markets.

http://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=ende&p=/oNdK.&search=u eber

Of course they care about the above cheap markets. Thats where they are king.

Re:10+ year old tech?

[nurb432]

You are new here arent you.

150.00 for that?

[night_flyer]

big deal, most corporations pay to have faster machines hauled off as they are upgraded...

I have a feeling they will anyway

[Moraelin]

See, when you're paid to cry wolf, you cry wolf. Lots. Invent gazillions of imaginary wolves all over the place.

The BSA is paid to cry wolf. That's what it does for a living. It's there just to paint a bleak image where poor starving software developpers like MS or Oracle or Autodesk are losing trillions to piracy. It's there to take every single 3D Studio Max copy that some chinese kid downloaded to model a ship or skin for free mod for a $30 game, and present it as $6000 stolen from the poor starving software developpers. As a copy that would 100% surely be bought if that kid couldn't pirate it. (Never mind that that's 6 years' average salary down there, and frankly noone pays _that_ kind of money just to make a free mod.)

But even that kind of crying wolf has at least _some_ minimum touch with reality. After all, a copy pirated _is_ a copy pirated. So at some point the BSA figured out they can do better than that. Nowadays what they do is count the PCs sold and apply some bogus "for every X PCs, a copy of program Y should have been sold." E.g., for each PC, an OS should have been sold. For, say, every other PC, a copy of MS office should have been sold. Etc. Anything that ends up under their expected numbers, is taken 1-to-1 to mean money lost to piracy.

So, yeah, I wouldn't be too surprised if these PCs end up counted like that too: What, 1 million MIPS PCs sold and no MIPS OS sold? Damn pirates! That's 1 million copies of IRIX and NT 3.5 for MIPS that are pirated down there! That's billions of dollars lost by the industry and hundreds of thousands of jobs lost! Oh the humanity! Someone do something! Quick, the government do something against it!

So, how useful are these computers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm wondering how useful these would really be as general purpose computers. If you wanted to run Windows and really had a compatible MIPS architecture (unlikely unless you do a lot of testing), you'd have to go back to NT 3.51...maybe NT 4. I don't think anyone's making software to run on that anymore (certainly not IE6 or Firefox...you may be able to get Mosaic or an early version of Netscape, but that's not very useful).

You can certainly port linux to it. But current systems tend to run poorly on older hardware. I have SUSE 9.3 on a 550MHz Dell computer in my office with 256MB RAM. It's only marginally usable. Firefox isn't impossible (takes two or three seconds to change tabs, for example), but OpenOffice takes a coffee break to load. Even SUSE 9.3 on a dual processor Athlon MP 1800+ is sluggish at times (over 30 sec to load OpenOffice, for example). And you can't seriously advocate going back to RedHat 6.0 (which I think was out at the time that 500MHz-1GHz PCs were common). Bugfixes and older software versions would make it _such_ a painful experience.

Suprisingly enough, the only modern OS that I've seen that works well on older hardware is OS X. I installed OSX 10.3 on a 450MHz G3...there are some areas where performance is lacking, but Aqua & Safari work suprisingly well. I don't care much for OSX in general (as a proprietary system, Apple makes me more nervous than Microsoft, and it doesn't do multiuser very well with no easy way to configure SAMBA-type filesharing, sshd, or Cocoa-vs-X-based applications), but I would have to admit that it does run better on old hardware.

Re:So, how useful are these computers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian with Firefox and Thunderbird would run fine on that computer (but what WM/DE is light AND userfriendly enough). If this thing would take off I bet Ubuntu would port to it too. Why not? There's even a SPARC port in the make nowadays.

However from what I read this computer was to be supported by a specific Linux developed for it.

I was more thinking on proprietary software. You mentioned that too, but not in this regard. There is some proprietary software ported to Linux/x86. Like Flash. Nice. Some is even ported to AMD64. Nice. But if you run Linux/SPARC, Linux/ARM, Linux/PPC, Linux/MIPS... you're left out. I know theres F/OSS Flash apps avail but not on par with newest standard. My point is, you want an experience as 'complete' as possible and Flash is an integral part of that. 'Linux' gets closer and closer to that experience, but it sometimes heavily depends on x86.

If every chinese buy one...

[vhogemann]

MIPS will be the most deployed processor architeture on desktops! And Linux will be the #1 desktop operating system!

Take that Intel/AMD/Microsoft!

Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sweet! Where can I buy that software? Oh wait, it's not available? Oh well, there goes that excuse...

Forget Patents

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason they can make $125 pcs is because their labor force is practically a slave force. It's almost worse than working for Dell!

Re:Forget Patents

[Anonymous Coward]

Reason is volume. As for slave force: Apple and iPod.

Walmart going away...

[mr_mischief]

If that happened, what would we do with all of those 3-acre buildings that would be sitting empty? Nobody has that many warehouse raves to throw.

Microsoft-proof

[rbanffy]

Cool. Not only Windows-free. It's Windows-proof ;-)

(OK... I remember there was a Windows NT for MIPS, but I bet it won't run on these. Besides that, who wants Windows NT 3.1 again?)

Moo

[Chacham]

I wonder if they'll build censoring rules right into the OS.

It'd be the only safe way to have accurate news, that protects the people.

Compromised Hardware?

[Garrett Fox]

Because this will be hardware made through the Chinese government, won't this tech give them an unprecedented to build various spying and censorship tools right into the chips? It seems to be true that many US printers print hidden ID codes, so if you think TCP/DRM/etc. are bad, imagine what the Chinese will have imposed on them.

there - WAS - NT 3.1 for MIPS

[swschrad]

long gone. no RISC support for windows for quite a while. the only processors generally supported are the X86 family, Itanic, and the strongARM for mobile windows, CE, and other subsets to the best of my knowledge.

DEC ALPHA was the longest-supported RISC chip, but that support died with NT.

Where can i order one?

[nurb432]

Since you wont be able to buy MIPS chips around here anymore, and 125$ for a 2ghz risc computer is dammned nice. Sign me up for 3.

And no, im not kidding.

IP

[nurb432]

No, most of the mips concept is purely out in the open. Only a small part of the 'named' mips instruction set is copyrighted, and you dont *need* those to function well.

Mips is more of a concept then a trademark.

OT: Linux Chinese Support

[MrResistor]

I'm just starting to learn Chinese, and I use Linux exclusively. What do you recomend for chinese input on linux? One of my class assignments will require that I create a powerpoint presentation in chinese, which I'm hoping I can do in OOo, but I haven't yet figured out how to input stuff.

Re:OT: Linux Chinese Support

[808140]

I used to use SCIM. I say used to not because I found something better, but rather because sometime ago (a long time ago) there was some bug in SCIM that made GAIM crash, and so I changed to fcitx, which does better wubi but has an inferior pinyin input method. If you're learning Chinese, you'll probably want pinyin.

Both of these are simplified, although SCIM has traditional too, along with Japanese, Korean, and everything else you can think of (it's a plugin architecture.)

I'd say go with SCIM. fcitx's documentation is in Chinese, so if your Chinese is fairly basic SCIM is a better bet. There's a KDE version called SKIM if you have a preference (SCIM uses GTK). I don't use either GNOME or KDE so I was fairly agnostic on this point.

Emacs also has a bunch of acceptable input methods.