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Sub-$100 Laptops Have Finally Arrived
Roman Phalanx writes "OLPC had promised that it would be possible to mass produce a sub-$100 laptop. The folks at OLPC tried to realize that dream by re-imagining what a laptop looks like. How large of screen and keyboard it has. What OS runs on the laptop. Now that OLPC has decided to super size their systems to run Windows XP, the $100 price point has slipped beyond their reach. A Chinese firm has realized that dream. Taking the best from both the OLPC and EeePC. They ditched x86 compatibility and switched to a MIPS architecture to further reduce production costs. HiVision has managed to create a UMPC that sells right now for $120.00. They say they have refined the manufacturing process and have learned from building this laptop how to mass produce a laptop that will sell for $98.00." (More below, including a link to a video of the device.)
"The new HiVision MiniNote is due out in October of 2008. TechVideoBlog has footage of one of these Mini Notes being shown off at a trade show in Germany. They have managed to borrow a unit overnight for a while and have done a quick review on it.
Overall it looks pretty good. MIPS based processor, WiFi, 1GB flash storage, it runs Linux, has 3 USB ports, Ethernet, SDHC card reader, audio in and out, multi-tabbed Firefox browser support and Abiword for word processing. Running a custom Chinese Linux distrubution named Xip.
Overall performance seems snappy and no problems connecting to WiFi. Other than the lack of a webcam and the Adobe Flash Player it seems perfect. For $98 it looks like quite a value."
Overall performance seems snappy and no problems connecting to WiFi. Other than the lack of a webcam and the Adobe Flash Player it seems perfect. For $98 it looks like quite a value."
I think from past experience (Linux 64-bit) that we'll be waiting a long time for Flash on this one... other than that it seems like a great idea to do what they did!
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
The iphone doesn't run flash and it costs twice as much. No one will ever buy one!
Oddly enough, I've been seeing an increase in visitors browsing my site at 800x600 over the last couple of months. It's at 11% now, and probably still climbing.
Maybe lower-resolution devices really are on the usage upswing.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Funny. I'm running a full linux on a MIPS machine I have here. I can install binary packages of everything I have wanted to install by just doing "ipkg install ". Check out OpenWRT if you're interested.
c++;
Sooo... where are they available? A quick google search yields nothing on either the currently available models or this one.
I am hoping that some day soon, people that offer free WiFi (and other places) have a couple of tables with a basic pc built into them, kind of like those old table style video games. The trick is that to use it, you have to have a thumb drive (or something like it) that plugs in, providing storage, OS, personal files etc. There are several distros of Linux that could do this, and there would be some performance issues, but it would certainly turn just about everything (with these or similar systems) into Internet cafes... or whatever you like to call them.
When you are mobile, you plug it into your PDA/phone or other mobile device. When you arrive at home, just plug the thumb drive module into your desktop and you're off.
Yes, I realize that anyone could poke technical holes in that description. I'm just trying to give the basic idea. As storage physical size shrinks, this will become more possible. I'd like to see it. It would not work for absolutely everything, especially storage intensive applications, but for a lot of things it would work. Who carries their porn collection around with them anyway?
I'd also be happy with a mobile device/phone that allowed not only this module to plug in, but additional storage USB devices (mp3 etc) so that the modules become common place. usb storage module for your mp3 player can be plugged into your phone also, as well as your mobile computing device.
you should get the option of phone sized pda, or maybe sidekick style option etc.
Again, I know there are a lot of reasons that this is a problematic goal, it's just a wish list top 10... for me anyway.
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MIPS CPUs are very simple to design, if you're willing to accept the limitation of one instruction per clock. I once met the entire design team for a midrange MIPS CPU, and it was six people. When you look at a picture of the silicon, you can barely find the instruction decode and execute logic; it's a tiny fraction of the chip.
MIPS was overrun by the superscalar architectures, where you get more than one instruction per clock, at the cost of a huge increase in CPU logic complexity. The Pentium Pro design team was around 3000 people. (The Pentium II and III were basically Pentium Pro logic reworked for later fab processes.) It's amazing that x86 superscalar machines are even possible. (Think hard for a moment about what has to happen when you store into code just ahead of execution, which is fully supported by all x86 CPUs.) If you're willing to go superscalar, the simplicity goes away, and so does the advantage of the MIPS architecture.
But if you're willing to accept one instruction per clock, and a 2X code bloat over x86 (making all the instructions the same length means the register-to-register instructions take more bytes than they need), it's a simple way to build a CPU.