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Meet the 5-Watt, Tiny, fit–PC
ThinSkin writes "Meet the fit-PC, a tiny 4.7 x 4.5 x 1.5-inch PC that only draws 5-watts, consuming in a day less power than a traditional PC consumes in one hour. By today's standards, the fit-PC has very little horsepower, which makes it apt for web browsing and light applications; today's games need not apply. Loyd Case over at ExtremeTech reviews the fit-PC and puts it through its paces, noting that performance is not this PC's strength, but rather its small size and price tag of $285."
...the Mac Mini?
:-P
At half the price, I'm already sold.
**cough** slashvertisement **cough**
Help Me! I'm trapped in the tubes! Oh noes! Here comes a internet!
Uses the case for cooling, huh?
I wonder how it'd work if you wrapped it in plastic, stuck it in a bucket of ice, and overclocked it?
No flash. Fewer USB ports than the XO-1. Lame.
(And Gentoo? WTF!?)
Give it Wi-Fi, and i'd buy one. Maybe for just checking email or looking at porn, and other school-related stuff.
"A gentleman never strikes a lady with his hat on." - Fred Allen
it needs at least one gigabit port.
and you could have a lightweight VOIP phone that runs forever. Sweet. Solar power computer FTW!
That website is hideous....whoever designed it should be fired. I am interested in buying it, but I don't even want to hit the button to see the next page.....can't we have a link to an all in one print page ?
Heh! "the fit-PC has very little horsepower, which makes it apt for web browsing and light applications; today's games need not apply."
;) Hell, why not buy a ton of 'em and start the next monthly/bi-monthly/whatever Quake 1 LAN in your area? That would be pretty damn cool IMO.
;)
Today's games? Pff.. It'll run Quake! Good enough for me.
But then again maybe I'm the only one who considers an install of Quake 1 a required part of installing a fresh copy of any OS...
This architecture is becoming familar. The Koolu is $200 to $300, is a bit more mature (its expandable) and comes from Canada. This architecture makes for a great system as, for instance, a home web, file, and VOIP server. The AMD Geode has a great GPU, but a significant web app (especially with lots of animation) will severely tax the CPU's horsepower.
My core 2 Duo based laptop with 2 GBs of RAM eats 18 watts with *screen turned on*!
Laptops are really really cheap these days. I bought an Acer laptop for a family member, brand new from CompUSA, last month for $350 (It has an Intel CPU I forget which one). It will probably run circles around this thing and costs about the same (once you include the $40 shipping cost on fit PC) and consumes little additional power.
What is the point of this fit PC again?
Dude, you are truely clueless. This isn't a competitor with the XO-1. The is a competitor for the Soekris board (re: http://soekris.com./
The price is right in line with Soekris' new top-end system, though a little underpowered. But it does have a video display.
The real question is whether this new system supports serial console in the BIOS. That's a big plus for the Soekris board. These types of boxes are perfect for secure servers for small outfits.
With OpenBSD, Soekris has been the best firewall around. I also have one as a mail server, running all the RBL add-ons to Postfix, along with spamassasin and recently I added domainkeys. Next up is DKIM.
My Soekris box is a little underpowered at 266 MHz. But this mailserver has been SUPERB for my own needs. I get a couple thousand email messages per day, plus about 1000 SPAM attempts per day. Almost no SPAM gets though, and what little does is about to be tuned out.
I'm thinking about upgrading to the newest Soekris board, which should provide more than ample horsepower for my site. The box that this article is about may be a contender; it's certainly competition.
The big question will be whether it provides a serial console.
But no, the market here isn't the XO-1, or your normal PC supercomputer. It's for small footprint embedded systems.
This is a joke.
Go out and get a Dectop for less than half the price. Slightly weaker specs, and doesn't come pre-loaded, but does come with a keyboard and mouse. My Dectop is now functioning very nicely as a low-volume, silent (replaced the hd with a CF card & adapter), 5-watt LAMP web server.
And the Dectop looks better, too, IMHO.
o 1 Sig beneath your current threshold
Man I'm depressed now. This thing has higher specs then my laptop!
True, my laptop's 5 years old. But STILL! I'm now in the process of trying to talk my wife into letting me upgrade.
BTW: yes, works great for going online and writing non-graphical programs. (web sites, CLI) But useless for most action games. Tomb Raider plays fine on it though.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
Given it's stuck at 256MB RAM - which is sad. It's got a few other downsides like probably some bottleneck somewhere beween IO and the CPU. But it only draws 5 Watts and needs no active cooling which is really cool. Considering that this is a small company and they manage to offer their micropc for such a low price it is a really interesting device. 5 Watts ... my Eco-Bulb in my desklamp uses 7. Quite awesome actually.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The XO-1laptop, which also uses the Geode processor and draws 2-3W when running apparently - this system makes a nice desktop equivalent. Since often the screen on a laptop is the biggest power drain of the system, it would be nice to see a low-power screen available to go with it.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
This would be great for a lot of situations where you're using solar power to manage devices and want a WWW frontend or such. Could run this on a 10W ($100) panel without too much trouble.
Imagine a whole Beowulf cluster of these!
This machine runs quieter and cooler than your laptops, for one.
Whether that's worth the price/performance difference depends on the buyer.
It would also be more suited to running as a light-duty server or networking device than a laptop would.
while they may not be as small as this, they offer more flexibility as 256M RAM is not really going to run Win XP very well is it?
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
FitPC has nothing on these guys! http://www.picotux.com/
Adeptus
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
500 MHz?
Not sure how the Geode stacks up to the Athlon 64 clock-for-clock, but I have an Athlon 64 laptop with frequency scaling; it throttles down to 800 MHz to save power when not under load?
Guess what?
800 MHz is enough for practically everything.
On first impression this might be just what I've been looking for to sell as remote sensors to go with EasyIDS. I've been trying to find something with a small physical footprint for less than $350 for quite a while. Granted it doesn't have any Gb nics but chances are someone that is sniffing that much traffic is going to be using a commercial product anyways.
....maybe even for a proxy server?
Might also be able to use it for Endian Firewall or Proxmox
gentoo on this? Imagine updating your kernel :shudder:
from a fit-PC!
But doesn't come with an Ethernet port.
I have keyboards and mice floating around, and don't need them for a NAS box or a router.
It's a nice box and all - I have a PIC, which is the first generation of the Dectop, have to boot it off a USB thumbdrive to get it running Linux. But the fit-PC has some points in its favor.
Depends on what you want it for. Hey, choice, what a concept.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
See here.
It's worth pointing out that the Dectop appears to be a recased derivative of the AMD PIC.
Read the reviews before buying to get an idea if it's a good fit, even though it IS cheap.
http://store.dataevolution.com/ReviewsList.asp?ProductCode=DT-7001&Reviews=Y
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Way to write an article about a 5W system and then forgetting to tell us the expected battery life.
... Vista?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
*sorry* try again
Unreal Tournament 3 demo will be dropping sometime in the next two weeks... and even an in-box Linux client
I agree. I bought a $CDN 450 laptop a couple months ago. Loaded Mandriva on it and it runs very snappy. When I'm running under a regular load it consumes about 20 watts. That's for a 1.6 GHz P IV Celeron, with an Intel 950 GMA. Much more useful than what you get with this fit PC. Plus you can bring a laptop with you, and use it at the coffee shop and such. I don't imagine you can do the same with this one.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I cannot see how this computer would be all that much greener in the long run. Lets face it what is an extra 5-10 watts to have a faster machine, I cannot see that extra 5 watts making a massive difference to the environment, plus I am sure if you wanted to run you're box off the sun the extra $100 for another panel that supplies 5 watts is not going to kill you. I am all for low power greener machines but I think you need to still make more usable machines that are going to keep up with technology slightly better so that the machines themselves do not become junk.
I am curious to see how you can use this tiny PC as a phone, or at least how in the world you can use it by carrying around like a phone. You don;t seem to realize that with that PC you also need to carry around a monitor, a keyboard and mouse.
Actually, yes, because it is a lightweight PC. If you bother to read the article, you'll see that the company provides Windows drivers and you can indeed install Windows on it. The point of the device is not gaming though, it's light internet use or any of a dozen other things small-form-factor computers are good for.
And yes, I know you were trolling, but I can never resist feeding them these days.
Might be a good candidate for m0n0wall w/ dual NIC.
Another lovely company that tricks you with outrageous shipping costs to artificially drop the "price" of the computer. Also, check out the super friendly support and warranty policies.
Do yourselves a favor and get a VIA-based mini-itx board for that kind of money.
Seems you can get a VB7001G (1.5Ghz) for about $130; add in $30 for 512MB of ram (2x the fitPC), and however much you feel like spending on a compactflash card, USB memory key, or smaller laptop drive. Say, $50 for a 60GB drive (more than the fitPC's 40). $40 for a picoPSU; $30 for a AC adapter. Buy a crap case for $30 if you don't have one you can use already. Install a gigabit NIC for under $20 (dunno if there are any cheap dual-interface gigabit NICs.) That's under $310, and quite a bit more bang for the buck. It probably won't be 5w, but it'll be well under 20w given that board seems to use about 10w.
If you want to go even cheaper, intel is fighting back against via, like with the D201GLY. It's $70, 1.3ghz celeron, DDR2 ram...
Please help metamoderate.
... until I saw the shipping cost. $95?!
Too bad, this thing would make an absolutely kickass DOS machine. (I'm serious! As long as the BIOS does USB/PS2 keyboard emulation.)
It's the thin client revisited. A very good, yet old, idea.
HTML, CSS, POP3/SMTP/IMAP, JavaScript and, in some special cases, JRE and Flash it's all the vast majority of the people really need. Damit, it's almost 90% of my home computing usage in work days, and I'm a T.I. professional.
I hope they manage to make it work this time.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
This is i believe a nano-itx. There is also a pico-itx which is slightly smaller, draws less power, ect. But i'm actually more interested in a Mobile-ITX which should come out next year, but was demoed at Computex earlier this year. They boasted it could run windowsXP drawing only 0.5Watts.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
wonder how well this would do in a car install. Use a smaller lcd touchscreen, hook up a gps thingie and i guess you are set? This way you can find your way around town or watch porn and crash your car at the same time!
Balderdash!
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
To me, the slight differences in watt consumption aren't the point, for my uses anyway. What I want is a fanless PC. With ethernet and a decent soundcard, and a PII/500MHz or faster, 256MB RAM, and maybe 1GB Flash, and a USB slot. I don't even need VGA: machines for display should be faster and beefier. And of course it should run Linux.
That gumstix looked cool. Are there more or better in its class, preferably under $150?
--
make install -not war
Its just a small SBC in a box. You can see the place to fit the PC/104 connector. Nothing amazing...
Ooh, I have one of these, and it's kind of a mixed bag. The people who make them don't really seem to have enough Linux experience to really set this thing up so that it makes sense out of the box, definitely buy it only if you're planning to reinstall Linux on it.
/etc/inittab. Damn. On to Ethernet though, surely it ships with an ssh server running out of the box? Nope. On to plugging in a keyboard and display...
I expected at least a serial terminal out of the box so that I wouldn't have to plug in a display. It has an RS232 port (via RJ11 jack and adapter cable), and it is a semi-embedded little box. However they didn't enable it in
It does come with Gentoo out of the box (not sure why they picked that distribution), with KDE (ugh) and some various other software. I used UNetbootin (http://lubi.sourceforge.net/unetbootin.html) to install Ubuntu via the network, because the BIOS that shipped on my Fit-PC didn't have working PXE boot (they've since fixed that). Afterward, I enabled the serial console and SSH server, configured the network interfaces, installed the applications I needed (SVN server) and stashed the Fit-PC somewhere and forgot about it, as I had originally intended.
Overall, I like the Fit-PC, but I wish they had taken more care with the out-of-box experience and even the PC itself (the reset button, for example, is not exposed, and there's no soft-power way to shut the thing off since it has no other buttons). I do like the dual network interfaces, RS232, and low power and quiet operation, but there are tons of other similar Geode-based boxes out there, so this isn't too unique.
Finally, the Geode is going away. I wonder what the next semi-embedded x86 chip of choice will be.
The Asus Eee PC is a sub-notebook with a better CPU and a minimum of 2GB of solid state disk space. Prices in the US start at $269.
I don't suppose you would have noticed that they're shipping from Israel? In which case, $40.00 isn't too bad.
This rating is Unfair ( ) ( ) Fair (*) Funny
Sigh... If only. Modding would be so much more fun.
Aaah, that explains why Linux is so big here
And why sex is speaken of so rarely.
Think the FitPC would be a much better fit to what I want in a small form factor X86 box for a bit less than what a similar Mini-ITX system goes for. The FitPC appears to consume less power than the lowest power Mini-ITX systems - should be able to get several hours of run-time off of a motorcycle battery.
And if I just need to plug in my cable modem, I could save my $10 and use the USB connector.
256 MB is a little weak.
/complete/ computer illiterates who'd like to email the kids, and maybe see the holiday pics. Today's retiree has had about 20 years of PCs being common in the workplace. For a lot of regular office staff, it starts 30 years back.
It's okay to say a low powered machine is fine for most people who don't run the latest games, but recently the grandma sixpack users have started to watch a lot more movies via broadband, and they have a ton of large images they sort from their digital cameras. We're past being able to say that running a Flash site on Firefox is enough. The machine can't bog when they're cropping and removing red-eye with the user-friendly imagine editors that came with their cameras.
These days a basic computer has to be able to run OpenOffice smoothly, if you want a benchmark, because that oversized office suite is what people turn to when it's their turn to keep the books at the condo.
That's probably important to emphasize: Most 'grandma sixpacks' are not
Shouldn't be that hard to plug in a USB to ethernet adapter. If you really want three hard wired ethernet ports, you're probably better off getting a Soekris.There is a similar-looking computer that uses 1.8 watts called Aleutia.
If you are just looking for a server etc. The Kurobox
http://www.revogear.com/
is the way to go. No unneeded peripherals like a video, sound, etc to generate heat and suck up power. Just an ethernet and USB port. Plus, it holds a standard 3.5" drive. I use mine as a Web Server for story photos with Gallery, DNS server, DHCP server, music server (for Slimdvices Squeezebox), Video server (for Hauppague Media MVP), Internet proxy and print server (with LPD and ghostscript) without any speed issues.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
The Core 2 Duo U2000 series are 1.06-1.20 GHz single-core CPUs that are rated at 5.5 watts TDP. That's a little more than the Geode, but the C2D U2000 will absolutely run circles around the K7 Tbred-based Geode. I'd think that a U2000 with a low-power chipset like the 945GMS (yes I know, terrible graphics compared to the AMD unit's...) would do a tad better.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
Now that you mention it, a UPS is another separate thing you don't need if you use a laptop. It'll run for several hours with the lid closed and automatically suspend when the battery gets too low. Recently some goober at work blipped the power without warning anybody because he was installing some equipment, and everybody not on a laptop lost their work. (Granted they should have been using UPSs).
Exactly. I picked up a Dell laptop with a broken screen for a song to replace a desktop that's on 24x7. Dropped in a 60GB drive, turned on noatime, and consumption is only 13W with the lid closed (12W once the drive spins down.) And that's at 1.2GHz; I can turn it down for even more savings if necessary.
I'm writing this on a PIII-800MHz that I've had for a while. I didn't buy it new, I went out and found it, dirt cheap, to do basically what this Fit-PC is aiming to do. I'm running Fedora and mainly it's just for surfing, email and some BitTorrenting. As for gaming and such... Well obviously these are not the computers your looking for, move along. Still these lightweights are useful for this purpose, but it's a very narrow use. But then again, $285!
Someone above mentioned the Mac Mini and that's a good point, but also it bears mentioning that these two systems are at very different price points. True they are both below $1000, which to me (being of a certain age) that seems super cheap, but $599 vs. $285, the Mac is over twice the money, and while it may be a better computer, it is not the most affordable. To me I think the trade-off in dollar/MHz would be invisible between the two given the purpose, the Mac's higher price reflects a more "complete" computer. Apple built down from the iMac to a price whereas this Fit-PC built up to theirs.
Just a thought
Competing against desktops and laptops that have 5 x the power for just another 100 or so, and it is difficult to justify this. Instead, they should be targeting flash ram and network devices. A good example is a mythtv client. But a slightly different one, would be to use POE (power over ethernet) to provide the power for a diskless system. Much easier to do.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I don't suppose you would have noticed that they're shipping from Israel? In which case, $40.00 isn't too bad.
Who said they're shipping from Israel? They probably have a US distributor; they'd be stupid not to, as otherwise it means the customer pays duties and deals with customs headaches.
Even if they are shipping from Israel, it still means the thing costs $320+. Besides, even in Israel, they're charging $20. That's highway robbery.
Please help metamoderate.
Turning off wifi, the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad X60 1.83GHz uses ~12W with screen on. With wifi ~15W. This without trying to optimize anything.
i can't wait. years from now, when i need to search slashdot for !fivewatt or !fivewatts, the clever monkeys at slashdot will have taken care of everything.
Laptops typically need active cooling. Many cheap laptops are inadequately cooled and won't run indefinitely without being switched off. This PC is entirely passively cooled. That's a big plus for many applications (think digital media playback). It's also less than a quarter the size of an average laptop, meaning that for people like me who cannot stand to work with laptop keyboards and small displays it's a better solution. Of course the negatives (slow processor, lack of expandability) are significant, but if it works for your app it's probably ideal.
> WRT54 doesn't have a 40 GB hard drive for logging
..and the wrt54g has 5 ports built in. It's pretty tricky to set them up for anything but the basic lan switching though.
It'll log to a remote machine though. Similar devices have USB for an external drive too.
> I don't know how much a WRT54 would cost if they added a 40 GB laptop drive,
I don't think you can add one, but others can...but it will log to an existing machine for centralised system management.
Max.
and it is sure useful in some applications, but other may be hindered by the lack of a PCI slot or two...
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The ones I saw don't have a hard disk, they had a slot for CF cards to act as a hard drive. They're very lightweight too, and fully supported by Linux. If these take off they could very well become a very inexpensive PC for people who don't need dual core multi-gigahertz systems.
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/13/teacher-faces-40-yea.html
Bert
Looks like the Technologic Systems TS-7300 with the battery back-up PC-104 board - including the T.S. logo on the front of the case. T.S. has just started shipping a board with a 500 MHz ARM-9, which would be about 3X faster than the 7300, but would need the VGA add-on board.
Is that a review?! There wasn't any information in that very short piece of text, spread out over far too many pages, that I couldn't have come up with myself. "It becomes slow when we run a big office suite and firefox on it and open more than 6 windows." What would you expect? I think the fact that it is still useable with that much load is a testament to the quality of even todays cheap hardware.
-- Cheers!
What does get warm is the external power supply - I wonder how many watts that consume ? 5 watts for the machine itself, something for the screen, something for the PSU. What is the total consumption ?
Soekris has a whole lineup of single-board machines with this processor. The prices are pretty reasonable, and they have cases and a some accessories. Netgate makes wireless hardware kits for Soekris aystems. Soekris made the hardware for the MIT RoofNet project.
The details are that it doesn't have an ethernet port on the box itself - instead, it comes with a USB 1.1 ethernet adapter that can't do 100 Mbps. But not a big deal for most internet connections, I suppose.
Seems to use a pc104 setup. All-in-all however, I would rather build my own with solid state storage
I had a laptop as a server (yes...). I rebooted it weekly. What exactly are you talking about? Even overclocked laptops don't need shut off to not overheat.
Great Intellect...
Very customer friendly, i must say. This caught my attention in particular:
"Warranty could be exercised only once per purchased product"
Is this legal?
http://www.ewayco.com/
...
They seem to be more cost efficient compared to most of the other companies mentioned here, although their order system is a little unclear.
To get clear specs, you also have to mail them, and their website looks like web 0.5
I wonder if this would have enough power to run Emule or uTorrent. A 24/7 p2p server that only uses 6 watts of electricity. That small HD could be a problem though. Would like to substitute a 1 TB HDD.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Warranty could be exercised only once per purchased product.
Wow - that's douchebaggery.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I wish I had modpoints for left the parent! All power supplies are classified with their MAXIMUM power output. If all the PCs in the world were using all the rated watts of their power supplies this would be a much less green world. 110W on the supply Box are on the cautionary side, it's very likely the Mac mini uses normally around a quarter of that (It's mostly made out of notebook components afterall). Eiapoce as AC
$450 CND? What's that like $800 US?
Exactly, I picked up a bag of sand some oil, and I had some chemicals and a chip processing facility floating around in my garage. And I was able to make a computer for pennies on the dollar...
STOP COMPARING PRICES OF USED/SLIGHTLY DAMAGED COMPUTERS WITH NEW ONES!!!!! It is not a fair comparison. Because in time I can get a used or slightly damaged version of the fit-PC and save more money, on parts (assuming your time is worthless)
Clap Clap you can nuy someone modern computers for cheap, while other people buy very modern computer for not so cheap. You save so much money see how smart you are. You can play all the games made 2 or more years ago, smooth without any problems, especially with the fact the monitor can only support 1024x768.
Some people like having new hardware. 5-Watt 13 Watt it uses only 38% of the power. which is good especially if you need a lot of computers running non cpu critical things.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
My PPC 1.25 ghz G4 Mac Mini draws ~14W at idle and ~31W when its CPU is maxed about by distributed.net RC5 client. I measured this w/my Kill A Watt (http://www.p3international.com/products/special/P4400/P4400-CE.html).
decTOP is selling FOUR for $300+S&H right now. It's got less specs, but I use mine just fine with its USB 1.1 and USB ethernet.
I think fit-PC might be more interesting if it were sub-$200. Because processor-wise it is comparable to the decTOP. It only has slightly more RAM and a slightly bigger hdd. I don't think USB 2.0 and Ethernet suddenly makes something $200 more expensive.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Mini-ITX form factor is 6.7" x 6.7", this one has a 4.7" x 4.5" (x 1.5) case.
So it's closer to Nano-ITX with 4.7" x 4.7" but this one is even smaller. I don't know which size the motherboard actually has, but if it's an ITX it can only be Pico-ITX but it's probably some embedded computing form factor like ETX.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
... that's pretty paltry for the money.
You can pick up a Via C3-based cpu, board, and chassis for a little under $80. Another $100 will get you a gig of RAM and a 25-gig hard drive. In other words, twice the CPU power, four times the RAM, and six times the drive space, and all for $100 less.
Yeah, I know - that would use more than 5 watts. But considering that everything in the machine except the CPU is nearly free, I wouldn't have expected it to have that sort of price tag. Ah, well. I guess they have to make up for low quantities.
Now, if they just had a usable display with a similar power draw, THAT would be nice.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Does it run Doom?
There's no such thing as a Pentium 4 Celeron! Pentium 4, or Celeron, but not both...
I was researching this the other day. I was trying to find a replacement for my VIA EPIA SP8000E (it's a piece of junk; almost everything causes it to freeze or not boot).
Requirements: Low power consumption. Low noise. Enough juice to run a decent web browser. Linux-compatible. Cheap.
Being fed up with VIA, I first looked to laptops. Power consumption about 20 Watts, good. Need to be a bit more careful about the noise, but you can find quiet laptops no problem. Any laptop probably smokes the SP8000E performance-wise, so that's good too. However, I couldn't find a decent laptop for under around 500 euros, even second hand.
Eventually, I bought a Jetway J7F2-EDEN fanless motherboard/cpu combo, a nice case with a passive power supply, and a gig of RAM for about 300 euros. Disks, display, and keyboard will be taken from my old system, as they would have been in the case of a laptop. Power consumption should be about 20 Watts. The system has no moving parts other than the disks. Performance ought to be better than what I have. And it's cheap.
So, I guess, there's something for everyone. If you want to carry the system, or are OK using a laptop screen, keyboard, and mouse-substitute, get a laptop. Will be about 500 euros. If you don't want to carry it and want full-size input devices and screen, get a system like the one I got. Will also cost you about 500 euros if you have to buy the disk, keyboard, mouse, and monitor. If you want _really_ low power consumption and a PC, get the one mentioned in the story. Again, it will be around 500 euros, including monitor, disk and input devices. Word of warning: I work with machines like that at work and they are really really slow for today's standards.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
as that is what a typical bicycle-dynamo produces. Providing you make the OS safe and running from solid state memory - which should significantly less than a few watts - you could install it on your bike ;=)
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
I built something similar back in 2000/2001 (back then, such embedded boards sported a 200 MHz Cyrix GXm CPU — man were such embedded boards expensive!). Used that beast in my car as an MP3 player with 30 Gigs of HD space. Look for the string "MPorty" with your favourite search engine. Sadly, the two Linux magazine articles were taken offline since. I'm taking my old MPorty web page online for a while so if anyone's interested...
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
I've had multiple laptops that overheat after about 10-12 hours of use. I've even had one that would shut off after 1 hour if you left it directly on a table: you had to put it on top of something to give it enough space for the airflow to its (tiny) cooling fan that was located on the bottom of the case. I agree that there are laptops that don't have this problem, but there are also laptops that do.
This looks a lot like the Linutop: http://www.linutop.com/
Same price too, but it has more usb ports.
I recently built a mini itx system based around a via 1.5 ghz processor to do the same basic tasks the fit-pc is designed to handle. The fit isnt a bad box, it's just that it isn't really anythything new or innovative. Looks to me like they took a pico-itx board, slapped on a laptop hard disk and called it a system. The price is good for the size, but you can build a system with a way better processor, more ram and add a CF to IDE adapter so you can go without moving parts.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
The ALIX board looks almost identical and it's very cheap. Even after adding a hard disk and a cabinet the price tag should be much smaller than the fit-pc.
Note: I'm in no way paid by or affiliated to pcengines.ch, just a very happy customer who set up some firewalls and wlan repeaters in the past with their WRAP boards.
So where can I get these in the USA?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Comparing clock speed in one processor to the clock speed in another processor has never been completely accurate in estimating actual system speed (example: Compare a 10 MHz 8088 to a 10 MHz 80286 and you'll find the latter is FAR faster).
Today, it's even more ludicrous to say that a 500 MHz processor is "about an eighth the processor" of a dual-core 1.83 GHz processor. Clock speed is only one factor (of many) that determines actual speed. Simple comparisons of clock speed only make the comparer look simple.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Delivery time: usually ships in 2 week. As of 13-Oct-07 fit-PC has been "slashdotted" (article on it published in Slashdot), so we observed unexpected demand peak. Currently we are out of stock. We expect to resume stock beginning of December '07. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Looks like this might be a great host for a SlimServer based MP3 system. Anybody know how well the server software performs on this box?
You do know that you are still using a VIA product?
I use one of these at home with an almost complete Debian install on a USB memory stick:
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/12454-12454-321959-338927-89307-3341342.html
US$200, no fan noise, very low power.
As many have pointed out, if you purchase an entire system with power consumption as a priority, you can achieve a lower total power consumption. But for US$200, I've cut my 'check email, look up something on Wikipedia' power consumption by two orders of magnitude since I don't need a workstation for that.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
Dual LAN?
It's from ISRAEL
The dual 100MBit ports do make it sound like an ideal candidate for an OpenBSD/[insert Linux distro here] router. I'd love to see more in depth specs on throughput, etc.
Yes, you can use it as a router for your 57.6k modem bank.. it's perfect!
The AppleTV
- Can run Linux.
- costs $300.
- has digital audio and video out.
- Can play 480p, 540p, 720p videos. I think 1080i as well, but I don't have that screen.
- Running Linux allows web, email, and playing DVD's (vlc) (external drive).
The new Intel MB with an embedded Celeron processor has far better performance at a lower cost. Try this:
$46.99 - Hard drive - 40GB, 5400rpm Seagate
28.99 - 1GB Memory - Corsair DDR2 533
69.50 - MB - Intel D201GLY, Celeron 1.33
54.95 - Fanless power supply - picoPSU-120
59.95 - Case - M300
$260.38 - Total - Shipping NOT included
Far better performance, reasonable power consumption (~25w), small and silent
Or, if you prefer single stop shopping, try this.
-- "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." - R.A.H.
The Wii is THIS close to becoming a desktop computer. They now support a keyboard, and its only a matter of time before Linux is running on this little beast. Its $250 and it its got reasonable power behind it. Its not a quad core system with SLI video cards, but its surprisingly snappy and does boost decent 3d graphics.
I predict in 1-2 years people will be subsituting a wii for a typical desktop system.
Unfortunately, the RAM on the FIT-PC is non-expandable - you're stuck with the 256MB, so there will be applications you can't run effectively even if you're happy with the 500 MHz. I don't know if they soldered it on or what, but they don't even _sell_ a larger-RAM option. The disk is probably replaceable with a larger one if you need to, and the slow CPU is IMHO just fine for a lot of applications, but the RAM limit is annoying.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
USB 1.1 maxes out somewhere between 6 to 8 Mbps of throughput, which would be adequate for surfing but would limit a router throughput to maybe 3 Mbps (bits have to go both ways). Emphatically not in the same league as the fit-PC. Contrast this to some embedded boards coming with gigabit ethernet adapters.
my Athlon Xp mobile 1800+, run at 1,5 GHZ. But if I do "powercfg.exe /change profile /processor-throttle-ac CONSTANT" with winxp, it run at 654MHz. It's enough for old games for example.
Most likely, so is the CPU in your desktop PC (assuming you have an Intel machine). So is ICQ. So are several other tech products that you probably use on a daily basis. And so am I. What's your point?
No. $450 CND is more like $460 USD.
-Phing
No, do not buy anything made by VIA. Mini-ITX is great, but I just got burned by VIA's southbridge DMA bug that they have not fixed in THREE years, nor do they make any attempt at looking like they care. Do yourself a favor and buy a Mini-ITX board, any board, without VIA chips on it.
Here it is, in all 21 pages of glory starting back in 2004: http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview.aspx?catid=28&threadid=60131&STARTPAGE=21&enterthread=y
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
Correction.
I'm assuming the original poster was referring to Canadian dollars, which is abbreviated CAD not CDN or even CND. In any case, I don't think the Fit PC was meant as a laptop replacement or a replacement for a power hungry PC. It's designed to fit a particular market niche.
It seems like when any new market niche comes along, similar to OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), people bash the price point for which it is offered and unfairly compare it to a budget laptop currently available on the market. Similar to the design requirements of the OLPC (affordable AND durable!), the Fit PC was designed with specific goals in mind (size AND power consumption; NOT necessarily portability). Just because you can buy an equally green laptop for the same or cheaper price doesn't mean it will work in an environment which requires specific requirements. Think before you immediately poo-poo on an idea that doesn't fit your personal particular goals/budget.
-Phing
But Everex has a Via-based desktop PC that draws 2 watts average, 20 watts peak, and absolutely out-specs this little guy--for $300. And you can pick it up at Wal-Mart. http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=7754613 1.5GHz Via C-7 80GB hard disk, SATA 1GB RAM Dual-Layer DVD±RW 10/100 Ethernet 56K Modem Windows Vista (included even if you consider it throwaway) It only really loses on the side factor, of course.
ARM parts have lacked horsepower vs x86, but the newer multi-code devices (http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS2917028234.html) will change that.
Small too. A whole system (CPU + RAM + some peripherals) can fit on a DIMM stick, or even on a single chip with stacked parts. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these in a regular laptop size case. Want a low power system for web and mail? Load just one module. Want a high performance gaming/ scientific workstation? Load all the module slots.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I want something exactly like this but with wi-fi that I can use as a simple home router and lightweight home/web server. Any ideas?
Clearly you've never heard of Cisco. Or know how datacenters are set up. Serial connections are the ultimate way of connecting to a box, especially if things go wrong.
Here's an example. About a year ago one developer (and that's a real systems developer, mind you, not a web-monkey) managed to bring down the entire company network via a hub and multicast. Granted, he was incompetent. But the failure was absolutely spectacular. All of the networking LEDs on the switches were pegged solid. No flashing whatsoever. One almost never sees this; it's impressive when it happens. But needless to say, the company was dead in the water.
The IT guys needed to get onto the switches quickly to start isolating the subnets to find out where the problem was, and disable the machine. Only they couldn't get onto the web or telnet/ssh interfaces because, by gosh, the network was pegged.
I was there and suggested they use the serial port on the switches. Ding. The problem was soon solved, the network was back online, and the developer was fired.
That's why RS-232 is going to be around for a long time.
So please, do tell us what the connection speed is at your house. In the US, you are lucky to get 6 Mbps. Most folks have 1 Mbps. And dialup is stil way too prevalent.
In fact, most small businesses and startups are in the same boat. You don't get over 20 Mbps unless you've got the big bucks to pay for it. Or are living in a different country.
Even if you use a colo server, you've still got to connect to it, don't you? Honestly, your comment is extremely stupid.
The Geode SC1100 is going away. This was a little 266Mhz i586 cpu. The New LX800 that this is based on is a system on chip that runs at 500Mhz. It IS the replacement.
To boldly use to and too two times and get it right too! They're not gonna believe their eyes when they see it there!
Someone just needs to make a Linux based ATM application or a Linux based touch-screen information kiosk. Then you'll have two obvious applications. Ditch the case and it's got these things going for it: small space footprint, low maintenance, and cheap to leave running.
FitPC has USB.
-- You can add a usb wifi peripheral to turn it into an Access Point.
http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=785329
-- add a usb/ethernet
for a DMZ with three ethernets...
usb ethernet example: http://www.amazon.com/Belkin-F5D5050-Networking-Ethernet-Adaptor/dp/B000062R4P
disclaimer: I just googled, no idea about linux compatibility of these particular devices.
USB makes this completely flexible...
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Let's face it, the FitPC is a pretty limited machine for the price.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Comrade! We have detected you using mathematics and logic to stop an anti-anti-Apple tirade! Please be advised: this is Slashdot. Apple sells only well-priced software and hardware. Pointing out that Apple (just like Microsoft) depend on, and produce enormous amounts of non-free software and are extremely successful in applying for (and being granted) patents to an extent it makes Microsoft look like frightened kittens. You should Never try to argue about these non-free aspect and that Apple is not very different from Microsoft, other than that they also limit users not just to their software, but their hardware. We here at the Ministry for Mac Fanboy Indignation hope that you will reconsider your eminently logical position and join with us in our outrage that Apple will cause world peace and that it's OK to try to sell your own movies when you're having a talk about OSX news as long as you (Jobs) can get even richer from doing so, with no thought on anything else than cash. You don't even have to take even a remote stance in society, being interested in helping the world with donations while still being rich (like Billy-boy). Thank you.
17-inch backlit LCD will cost you 20 watts. Doh!
Mac Mini: 1.83 Ghz Core 2 Duo
Tiny-PC: 500Mhz Geode
Apple TV: 1Ghz single, 256MB RAM, 40GB Hdd, No optical drive, etc...
Seems like they took the AppleTV specs and made a low-power version.
Why do Slashdotters insist on comparing apples and oranges?