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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.'"
Plasma implements the MIPS architecture minuses the patented parts. Could the Godson CPU be a variant of this?
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.
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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.
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.
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
"We were going to pirate it, but couldn't figure out how."
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.)
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