Free-market telecommunications have been systematically denied any chance to establish themselves. Most Americans believe that AT&T was a monopoly created by the market and dismantled by the government, for instance, but this is far from the case. The Cato report "Unnatural Monopoly" details the United States Federal Government's actions in creating the AT&T telephone monopoly, for various political and nonmarket purposes.
You don't want to tell us that the US government founded Microsoft, do you?
In the issue 04/2002 of the c't magazine from last month there was a test of the Eden 1500 (VE1500). The article isn't available online but here's a short summary (hmm... took me a while to find that issue:):
The VE1500 (the test board was labelled VT6010 for any reason) is shipped with a 533 MHz processor. The passive heatsink is glued directly onto the processor, there's a second passive one on the VT8601A aka Apollo PLE133 nortbridge. FSB is 133 MHz, they got only PC133-333 RAMs working. The memory is shared with the Blade3D graphics chip of the northbridge.
Did you know that VIA violates their own spec with this board? According to the spec there shouldn't be any 3.3-Volt supply but the board uses a standard ATX connetcor. An ITX power supply is only supposed to provide 47 Watts on three outputs (5 Volt Standby, 5 and 12 Volt). There's also a "problem" with standard ATX supplies: Even under full load the board neets only 7 Watts but a standard ATX power supply sucks much more.
Additionally the VE1500 got only 59 points in the BAPCoSYSmark 2000 benchmark under Windows ME. SYSmark 2001 under Windows XP didn't even run. The rating is equal to the Sony Vaio PCG-C1VFK (Crusoe TM5600 @ 667 Mhz) or a Celeron 400.
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Hope it won't take another 400 years to solve this one...
In the issue 04/2002 of the c't magazine from last month there was a test of the Eden 1500 (VE1500). The article isn't available online but here's a short summary (hmm... took me a while to find that issue :):
The VE1500 (the test board was labelled VT6010 for any reason) is shipped with a 533 MHz processor. The passive heatsink is glued directly onto the processor, there's a second passive one on the VT8601A aka Apollo PLE133 nortbridge. FSB is 133 MHz, they got only PC133-333 RAMs working. The memory is shared with the Blade3D graphics chip of the northbridge.
Did you know that VIA violates their own spec with this board? According to the spec there shouldn't be any 3.3-Volt supply but the board uses a standard ATX connetcor. An ITX power supply is only supposed to provide 47 Watts on three outputs (5 Volt Standby, 5 and 12 Volt). There's also a "problem" with standard ATX supplies: Even under full load the board neets only 7 Watts but a standard ATX power supply sucks much more.
Additionally the VE1500 got only 59 points in the BAPCo SYSmark 2000 benchmark under Windows ME. SYSmark 2001 under Windows XP didn't even run. The rating is equal to the Sony Vaio PCG-C1VFK (Crusoe TM5600 @ 667 Mhz) or a Celeron 400.