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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."
it needs at least one gigabit port.
Why? What Internet connection do you have that would come close to maxing out even a 10Mb connection? How many hundreds of machines do you have on your home network that would requires a Gigabit on the inside port?
PCs come with Gigabit Ethernet connections these days because the cost difference is negligible. Having two 100MB ports provides more than enough bandwidth for average home use and may save some power which is the point of this machine.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I've worked with these Geode-based 'miniboxes' during my day job for the past year or so. Max power draw is more than 5W, but it's not as bad as you make it. The Geode's TDP is 3.5W IIRC, though in average (i.e. not encoding video) use it's more like 1.0-1.5W. The HDD draws ~2.5W while seeking, but 1W while it's idle. The RAM + other goodies on the motherboard are ~1.5W. Even if you plugged in 5W of USB devices you'd still be looking at a total power draw of 10W under all but the heaviest loads. Measured at the wall it's a little higher due to PSU efficiency, but nowhere near the 2x factor you claim - more like 30%.
... 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.)
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.
If you're comparing them based on the amount of RAM or processor speed you're being a little less than "eminently logical".
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Definitely. Though for many broadband setups you do not need the second ether because you can use a PPTP, PPPoE or L2TP relay if supported on the modem.
As far as the article is concerned it is a demo how not to use such a system. What a bunch of clueless wankers.
Xterm, pulseaudio (reminds me I should put the instructions for setting it on my website) and run the damn thing diskless booting over the network. All of my machines in the house run this way booting of a dedicated server which holds the disk space and runs the applications. Even the laptop when in the house is booted this way and not off its own disk. As a result even something as slow as a Transmeta @800 or Via@400 is more than enough. My firewall and my development boxes also operate this way. I have used this approach for nearly 5 years now and while it takes some effort to setup the maintenance is many times less compared to anything else. You set it once and after that it just works.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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).
There's no such thing as a Pentium 4 Celeron! Pentium 4, or Celeron, but not both...