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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!
and you could have a lightweight VOIP phone that runs forever. Sweet. Solar power computer FTW!
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
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!
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
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.
... 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.
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?
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 :-)
There's no such thing as a Pentium 4 Celeron! Pentium 4, or Celeron, but not both...