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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."
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Help Me! I'm trapped in the tubes! Oh noes! Here comes a internet!
It has half the processor too.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Apparently they were confused about the Gentoo... TFA says it actually shipped with Ubuntu instead. Probably a good idea since Gentoo peeps would probably rather customize it from the start anyhow, and Ubuntu is easier for the less techie of us.
I had been wondering when a tiny computer with 2 ethernet ports and decent CPU would come out... Too bad I've not got a router I really like and no real reason to mess with it now.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
and you could have a lightweight VOIP phone that runs forever. Sweet. Solar power computer FTW!
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?
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
800Mhz is plenty when you have (relatively) huge caches and fast RAM, as well as the headroom of being able to triple your speed on demand. Have you tried actually limiting the Athlon to 800Mhz? You'll start noticing some really long pauses, especially if you take out all but one of your RAM modules. With a 500Mhz P3 and more 384Mb RAM, Firefox is sluggish even on simple web sites.
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.
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.
Yeah, i see what you're saying, it's impossible to use less electricity so why bother trying! there's no point using fluorescent lights, cause that power will be sucked up by my tv anyway! there's no point getting an efficient car cause some fucking soccer mom is driving an suv! and so on.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
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.)
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!
I had been wondering when a tiny computer with 2 ethernet ports and decent CPU would come out.
Some years ago? The only advantage I see to this unit is that it's black (instead of green), and it offers video output, none of which may or not be useful or appropriate.
That said, it's good to see other product offerings in the market.
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.
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.
Zonbu
That looks like it has most everything you want.
Aaah, that explains why Linux is so big here
And why sex is speaken of so rarely.
Huh!? So, you are going to get a 5W box so you can hook it up to your 16-disk SAN and save on power?
Comrade! We have detected you using mathematics and logic to stop an anti-Apple tirade! Please be advised: this is Slashdot. Apple sells only massively overpriced hardware. Pointing out that Apple sells something equivalent to its actual value, instead of the fantasy-land price that internet geeks believe it should cost (id est, free) is double-plus-ungood. We here at the Ministry for Nerdy Indignation hope that you will reconsider your eminently logical position and join with us in our outrage that Apple does not price their products at Mom's Basement prices. Thank you.
IAALS.
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);
Why not, if someone was going to run a lab or cafe full of them?
Turning off wifi, the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad X60 1.83GHz uses ~12W with screen on. With wifi ~15W. This without trying to optimize anything.
Good point; according to Apple my new iMac uses 280 W max., but in practice it's more like 120 W. Which is quite low compared to my old PC + 19" CRT, who did a nice 225 W together.
-- Cheers!
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.
Windows Vista?
/. standards a MS fanboy (though not really), to make an anti-MS joke about Vista HW requirements? Clearly this site has peaked. ;-))
(C'mon Slashdot, it falls to me, by
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).
Your server has a monitor? How quaint :-)
Idle on a laptop hard drive is typically around 0.5-1W, peaking at 2-3W during writes. Spin up could consume 5W on its own, albeit briefly. The CPU only uses 0.9W, so I don't think 5W would be an unreasonable number for normal operation.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
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.
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.
What you seem to be trying to say is that Mac Mini is better value for money, but value depends on what you're using it for.
If you need the lowest possible power consumption, space, and the widest range of operating temperatures, then Fit-PC is better value for money.
If you need a normal PC for regular users, but you want to think that it's a special PC for special users, then a Mac Mini is going to be better value for money.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Thanks, that's a decent approximation. However, it costs $249 if you don't subscribe to their Internet service (their real business), or $338 if you subscribe and immediately cancel, while the service costs $13:mo for 2 years minimum (cancelable) prepaid.
It's also kind of overkill for my app. It's got a bunch of SW preloaded, which has some kind of cost in installation/maintenance even if it's FOSS. It's got QXGA display, which I don't need, kbd/mouse ports (in addition to USB), and the 4GB Flash is costs about $30 (though power saving), which could probably buy a 40GB SATA HD - $15 buys 20GB SCSI HDs. Even the CF slot is probably a few extra unnecessary bucks.
I bet that the $249 is full of not only profit, but also higher to balance the loss of profit from the network business. And the extra HW could be another $50-75. If this box, stripped down, could sell for $100-150, then it would be exactly what I want. As long as I can telnet into it and force it to install Linux from across the ethernet.
Meanwhile, the Gumstix waysmall 200 is almost exactly what I want, for $129, but no soundchip. All the cheaper Gumstix have client-only USB, so can't take expansions. Though the $186 200xm-cf has CompactFlash, into which soundcards or CF/USB adapters can plug. And the waysmall 400m-bt has Bluetooth, which might send audio data to Bluetooth speakers or audio adapter, which could be even better, for only $200. But the audio module is $40, and the USB host module is $27, so $197 does get me all I want. Even if the extra $52 for the Zonbu gets a lot more (in a larger package). I wonder whether the Zonbu has 25% more processing power.
Since Gumstix is so close, there's probably a competitor. My app is basically an "ethernet to stereo/5.1/7.1 audio" adapter, which has got to be a popular app (at least a . Probably there's one that has either soundchip or just USB host (for external DAC), with options for either ethernet or WiFi. For under $200, if not yet under $150.
--
make install -not war
So go to MadTux and get a real PC for less. 512MB of RAM, 16x DVD+-RW, 80 GB hard drive, Vector Linux installed, and 60 days of email support for $281.99 with a Sempron 3000+.
There are other models and they can all be configured somewhat, too. What you get from MadTux is bigger and uses more power, but it's a lot more computer for the money. It's also vastly more expandable.
If you really need silent, low-power, and small, this FitPC is quicker than building your own EPIA case but not as fun. There are lots of PC/104 and EBX systems out there that don't cost much more. It appears that this is very similar to what Ampro, Winsystems, Via, and others are already doing, but at a good price. EMAC's PCM-5893 isn't much more in single unit quantities.
It looks like they (Compulab) are making the boards themselves since they are SBC builders. In quantity they probably could get close to these final prices by OEMing the boards and sticking them in project cases.
This PC is actually a rebranding of the ENC-iGLX it seems. You can also buy just the innards from Compulab, too. If you don't mind XScale instead of Geode and can handle 312Mhz, they have a system with 1 ethernet and wifi for $199.
Gumstix is much more interesting IMO, but this is a nice little box as far as PC compatibles go.
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