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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 $98 it looks like quite a value."
Here is a quick link to a youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKQbN6tpYXw
And I promise, it's not a rick rolling.
looks like 800x480 is becoming the new 1280×1024.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Strange times.
A pc for under 100$ and a shiny phone for over 400$. both made in china.
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.
If it doesn't run the Flash plugin, it's out of the Interweb game for most people. I'm sure someone will port GNU Gnash to it, but that's hardly a substitute. If the buyer only cares about some specific function like word processing, this might not matter. But the usual idea of netbooks is that they are more or less fully web-enabled.
No flash? That's a feature, not a bug!
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
it only has a 1GB HD. I think the idea is it's an appliance, not intended for you to really add apps to it. Theoretically it comes with what you need for what it's intended to do. It may or may not find a mass market, but only a subset of geeks will try to see what else they can run on it...
So... "Sub-$100 Laptops Have Finally Arrived". And yet... they haven't. It'd be nice (although, apparently, unrealistic) to think that we've learnt by now not to give credence to vaporware. Color me unimpressed.
The best newspaper in the USA: the Anderson Valley Advertiser.
OLPC was a noble idea, but one that was fundamentally flawed; this is because the specs did not originate from the areas of the world that would be using it but were spun out of a pie in the sky engineering lab. The scale of the OLPC was immense and impractical and the fact that they attempted it at all they should be given alot of credit for dealing with the political, economic and technical problems.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Windows CE runs on MIPS. There are plenty of WinCE programs compiled for MIPS. And so does linux, X, KDE, GNOME, etc. Are you implying that KDE/GNOME/X/GNU/Linux sucks?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
If they really start selling it for $98 I expect a *lot* of geeks to adopt it, and in that case I think we can be sure someone will start a distro(-fork) for MIPS for this device.
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
So, you've never heard of Linux before, eh? Welcome to /.
apt-get, yum, and the like will function just as well on MIPS as they do on x86, automatically downloading the pre-compiled binaries for your arch.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It's about time we ditch the deranged lunacy that is x86 instruction set, especially when even Intel is going on multiple-core strategy. I'd love to see ARM- or MIPS-based multi-core chips take over.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
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++;
No precompiled apps to download,
Yeah, there's only a little over 20,000 precompiled MIPS packages here. (Well, technically, somewhere in here, with an index located here.) I tend to think that 20,000+ is a little bit more than zero, but maybe that's just me. :)
Sooo... where are they available? A quick google search yields nothing on either the currently available models or this one.
This shows on the YouTube video at 03:58:
400MHz/32bit CPU
128M/64M RAM
1GB NAND Flash
Linux or WinCE
7" 800x480 display
Wireless LAN 802.11b/g
10/100M ethernet
...when there's a link to BUY ONE. Now. Right now. I have my credit card at the ready. Where can I buy one, even at the $120 price point that they are supposedly selling "right now" for?
Well? Link or it didn't happen. Otherwise, this is just another fucking slashvertisement.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
No, of course not.
It's the fact that:
it's trivially to compile for MIPS once you've got it compiled for every other major architecture.
the likes of Debian and other non-commercial distros have policies to ensure that all possible architectures are fully supported.
MIPS is an extremely popular architecture (Embedded, PDAs, SGI systems, etc.) ...that means there's tons of MIPS binary packages available for download.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I take it you never heard of Debian? They have precompiled binaries for pretty much every current processor architecture, including MIPS.
What are you talking about, 20,000 has 4 zeros in it!
No? Have you heard of acronym collisions before?
Millions of Instructions Per Second
vs.
Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages
And don't get me started on "POWER"/"PowerPC", because, of course, those terms would never refer to anything other than a CPU architecture...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Just because Aptitude works doesn't mean there's any MIPS packages to download.
True, but all it takes is a source repository, a cross compiler, and a huge botnet to turn things around.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Out of interest, it's a 32-bit XBurst CPU from Ingenic Semiconductors.
http://www.ingenic.cn/eng/productServ/XBurst/pfCustomPage.aspx
No precompiled apps to download, since no one has download links for MIPS and no proprietary company would bother with such a tiny market.
Are you kidding? What are you planning to do with this, have it as your main desktop?
At $98, I'll buy 2 or 3 of them to throw around the house for quick browsing. If they can get Flash, it'll be full-blown awesome.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
looks like you can get one now from geeks.com http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=ALPHA-400&cat=NBB
And four zeros is more than (one) zero. I rest my case. :)
To the grandparent, I think you'll find lots of precombiled binaries to download for MIPS.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Speaking of MIPS, isn't that something you measure x86 chips (or any chips) with? As in millions of instructions per second. I've never heard of an architecture based off a speed rating.
MIPS was one of the first successful manufacturers of a CPU chip with a reduced instruction set (from which of course the RISC acronym arose) as an alternative to the Intel x86 complex instruction set (CISC). The idea was that you could get a faster computer by being able to execute an entire instruction in a single clock cycle, rather than accept the overheads in silicon required by an architecture that takes more than one clock cycle to execute a single instruction. If you can do it in one clock cycle, it means that the whole instruction must fit within the instruction register, that is operation code, address, and any modifying flags that go with it. CISC instruction sets have to make a branch decision based on the opcode as to whether there's more to read into that register before the operation can complete. Less silicon to navigate meant more efficient structures, thus higher speed.
For many years, this worked quite well. Intel had to work very hard to make their CISC instruction set as fast as it is; market forces meant that MIPS couldn't keep up in the prime PC market, thus settled out into the small, high efficiency and inexpensive niche. You still see a lot of embedded systems using RISC chips.
This is also the basis of the controversy you encounter when using the term "MIPS" in it's meaning of "Millions of Instructions Per Second" as a fundamental metric of computer speed -- it's hard to compare a million RISC instructions with a million CISC instructions, in the same way that it's hard to rate an engine by the number of cylinders it has. Myer-Drake Indy cars had a lovely 4-cylinder engine that burned pure alcohol (the "Offenhauser", or "Offy") for many years that had a much higher output than your commercial V8. It's difficult to find a good standard metric some times.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
There are lots of MIPS Linux distros (Main Page), but that doesn't invalidate the GP post. The only apps you get are the ones in the distros. No one compiles for MIPS, since the market is miniscule. This means it is a crap shoot as to whether the source compile works, and you get nothing if the source isn't available. I had the same problem for PowerPC back when I had Linux on my old Mac, and I would wager that PPC is at least a big a market as MIPS would be.
One of my favorite bug hunts was when I found out the implementation difference in varargs between x86 and PPC: in x86, it is a pointer, which means changes in a called function don't propagate, while it is a pointer to a struct on PPC, which means changes do propagate -- thus the missing va_end only affected things on PPC.
The deranged lunacy turned ranged a long time ago.
The core instruction set has had multiple sets of custom enhancements over the years, and can now do some pretty amazing stuff "in a single instruction."
It's the RISC methodology that can no longer keep up except under specific constraints to the problem set. That's why Apple switched to keep up in general-purpose and multimedia computing, and you'll find PowerPC only in embedded and HPC any more.
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.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Editorializing from the headline, Roman Phalanx wrote
There's nothing "super" about losing one's software freedom. The XO was originally an educational project where even the computer the kids learn on could be part of the lessons. Switching to proprietary software means placing barriers on that education by telling the user that there are some things you weren't meant to know and shall be forbidden from learning, sharing, or changing to suit your needs. There's nothing good about that for the user, whose concerns outrank any proprietor. It is not society's job to placate software proprietors. The free software movement welcomes businesses that treat us as partners, not as a market to exploit. The free software community certainly gives businesses lots to work with and make money from.
Digital Citizen
Which is even MORE amazing since the dollar is worth HALF what it was 5 years ago!!!
At $350 per unit, It's not cost effective as a Sony PSP or Nintendo DS, but competitive to a mix between a QWERTY PDA with usable RAM/TV-out/redundant-expansion. In other words, it's a trade-off of a better Motorola A12000 CellPhone without the lock-in, more battery life, and better than the bulk of a laptop.
Did you miss the entire freakin' point of the story or what?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Ignore my retarded parents. I was adopted.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
Or, you could buy a cell phone.
Yeah. As a college student, let me tell you about all those times I've typed out lecture notes in class on my cell phone. Oh, wait.
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
Unless they're lying in the video, they've already sold over ten thousand of these puppies, or at least something that's about version 0.93 of it. That doesn't sound like vaporware to me.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
The deranged lunacy turned ranged a long time ago.
The core instruction set has had multiple sets of custom enhancements over the years, and can now do some pretty amazing stuff "in a single instruction."
Any x86 CPU you can buy at retail for at least the past three years IS a RISC CPU. x86 is just a compression/encryption format for RISC instructions, and there's not a single thing you can do with an x86 that can't be done on another architecture with similar hardware, and most likely cleaner and better. $50 million worth of R&D into any CPU design, architecture or instruction set will produce a roughly equivalent speedup. Since x86 is such a Charlie Foxtrot in the first place, starting with something cleaner is likely to produce even better performance.
It's the RISC methodology that can no longer keep up except under specific constraints to the problem set. That's why Apple switched to keep up in general-purpose and multimedia computing, and you'll find PowerPC only in embedded and HPC any more.
The only keeping up Apple needs to do is in IA-32 emulation and price. The same principle (commodity hardware means fewer hardware engineers and lower component costs) drove the commodity-based architecture of the Sun Ultra-5. It's ALL about money. It's always about money.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
I'm not certain if anyone remembers this? But I remember a Popular Science cover when the Timex Sinclair came out and people were crowing about the first "under $100" computer.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
... you don't recharge it, you buy a new one.
.kr is South Korea (i.e: not communist).
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.
I don't see why a RISC chip would be inherently harder to build than a CISC chip.
That's not the problem because RISC CPUs *are* easier to build. The problem is in *using* RISC CPUs. Each instruction is simple, so you need many instructions to do the same thing that one instruction does on CISC. So the code size grows. Also instead of fetching one MOVSx and chewing on it until you transfer the whole block your RISC CPU may need to sit in a tight loop and load/store word by word, and fetch the instructions also - hopefully from a local cache but it's still work.
Basically RISC and CISC are ways to optimize the distribution of work between different pieces of a computing system. If your memory is fast and cheap go RISC. If your memory is not very fast then you get a major hit in performance. But a RISC CPU is simpler. I can understand that when CPU of IBM/370 took a large room it was a valid point. But today IC designers literally don't know what to do with the silicon real estate that they have on each die. So it makes sense to throw FETs at the problem and save the precious memory bandwidth for things that truly must be in RAM - your data, or your efficiently packed machine instructions. RISC has advantages only when your CPU must be simple and run cold, and when RAM is faster than your CPU - and that is the case in many embedded systems.
We're talking about a sub-$100 laptop here, I don't think the end user's primary concern is going to be gaming.
This laptop is already being sold here for a couple of months in the Netherlands as Trendtac (http://www.trendtac.nl) I'm typing on it right now.
Take a look at http://www.littlelinuxlaptop.com or http://trendtac.hyves.nl to see what it can do.
Gert
(Don't know who modded you Insightful)
All x86 chips have a RISC core these days.
The main reason why x86 gives more bang for the buck is because of competition, and is despite it's clunky architecture.
Pointing out that there is a comparable alternative available on a one-at-a-time basis is *not a valid criticism of these products.
Pretend that GP, instead of just being a tweakhead who wants to fiddle with a UMPC, is tasked with fitting out 1200 employees with cheap laptops.
I assume you'd suggest that he needs to make 1199 more friends with old laptops?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love