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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."
Just curious but where's the line between unwanted advertisement and here's a new gadget you may be interested in.
I do embedded stuff and I was interested for a few seconds...
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
I sure would like an extra ethernet port on it, though. Would make a GREAT 3 homed firewall box so I can use the box I've got as my router/firewall/dns/dhcp server for something real (it is, after all a low end first gen p4, it could server SOMETHING).
My Babylon
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?
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.
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.
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.
Actually, the iPhone or the iPod Touch might be a closer comparison imho. The 5watt PC is a good deal less powerful (in both senses of the word) than the mac mini.
Of course, I know which one I'd take, if given the choice. For my money, getting a 5w computer is kinda pointless when I'm expected to hook it up to a desktop LCD which could easily use more than 10 times that much power.
Just for giggles, here's a point by point comparison:
5 watt PC vs iPhone/iPod Touch
$285 and up vs $299 and up
AMD Geode LX800 CPU @ 500 MHz vs ARM @ ~620Mhz
256 MB DDR (non expandable) vs 128MB? (non expandable)
40 GB 2.5" Hard disk vs 4,8 or 16 GB flash drive
Dual 100 Mbps Ethernet vs 802.11b/g, plus GSM/EDGE on iPhone
SXGA controller, 640x480 to 1920x1440 vs 320x480 built in multi-touch display and 480i or 576i video out
Two USB 2.0 high speed ports vs iPod dock port
Speaker and microphone interface vs Speaker and microphone built i on iPhone, plus headphone/mic jack
RS-232 serial port via RJ11 connector vs none
Single 5V supply, 3-5 watt, fanless vs battery operated, fanless?
120 x 116 x 40 mm, 450 gram vs 115 x 61 x 11.6mm 135g iPhone or 110 x 61.8 x 8mm 120g iPod
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
one glitch there, the iPhone ARM core is at 400MHz not 620, though it does still perform quite well
Compiling a kernel wouldn't be too bad on the fit-pc. It can be done in under 30min on a pc with half the performance. However, given the lack of RAM and how slow the hard drive is, building glibc and gcc would take days, and things like GNOME and KDE would be worse than most slashdotters would joke about.
Mac Mini: 1.83 Ghz Core 2 Duo
Tiny-PC: 500Mhz Geode
Looks like about an eighth the processor and a quarter the RAM, for more than a third of the price.
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.
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!
It seems to be overlooked by most people, but the fact that this little box is fanless means the laptop harddrive contains the only moving parts. I'm not sure if it would be a good idea, but this might be a good candidate for a cheap air tight sealed industrial-environment box.
I'm looking at the many potential possibilities for wearable computing, and this is a major thing for me. 5 watts means that batteries last forever, and that heat will be low. Small form factor means that it could easily be converted into something that you just take with you. Freedom of OS means that I can pick whatever will have the best drivers for the most peripherals.
I'm all sorts of interested in this, especially with that kind of price point.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
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 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.
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.