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Sub-$100 Laptops Have Finally Arrived
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Sep 04, 2008 06:04 PM
from the near-enough-at-least dept.
from the near-enough-at-least dept.
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."
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Because the interweb is unreliable (Score:5, Informative)
Here is a quick link to a youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKQbN6tpYXw [youtube.com]
And I promise, it's not a rick rolling.
Re:Because the interweb is unreliable (Score:5, Funny)
The HiVision [hvsco.com] site is down (slashdotted)... Site must be hosted on a sub $100 server.
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Re:Because the interweb is unreliable (Score:5, Funny)
"It has *real* Linux... looks like Linux, uhhh, some kind of Linux is here..."
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Re:Because the interweb is unreliable (Score:5, Funny)
"some kind of Linux is here..."
New slogan for /.? Or at least new annoying meme?
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video resolution...bleh (Score:5, Insightful)
looks like 800x480 is becoming the new 1280×1024.
Re:video resolution...bleh (Score:4, Insightful)
And 128MB ram is the new 2GB.. Actually it seems like it has either 128MB or 64MB, so guess what the cheap model will have...
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Re:video resolution...bleh (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:There's better products out there /w more RAM (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Re:There's better products out there /w more RAM (Score:5, Informative)
.kr is South Korea (i.e: not communist).
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Re:video resolution...bleh (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe lower-resolution devices really are on the usage upswing.
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Re:video resolution...bleh (Score:5, Funny)
Is that a "Too Many Pixels" error?
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Re:video resolution...bleh (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:video resolution...bleh (Score:5, Insightful)
looks like 800x480 is becoming the new 1280×1024.
Dude,
It's $98 and runs Linux.
I'm willing to forgive them for a lower than average screen resolution.
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Re:video resolution...bleh (Score:5, Insightful)
What old laptop you buy from a friend for $50 wouldn't be capable of running Linux and have a higher screen resolution?
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Flash won't be here soon (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Flash won't be here soon (Score:5, Informative)
Gnash already has MIPS support [wikipedia.org]. As this project is actually still moving right along, we can only hope for more. Plus, Gnash already supports YouTube (although it seems people are still having problems).
Bottom line: Thoughts of Adobe supporting Flash on MIPS is a joke. Gnash already supports MIPS but we'll have to wait a little longer for Gnash to support more advanced features.
NOTE: Swfdec [freedesktop.org] also supports MIPS. I have had more luck with Swfdec, and some distros are making it the default free Flash player. Plus, it seems to have more advanced feature supported.
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Re:Flash won't be here soon (Score:4, Informative)
There are versions of Flash available for ARM and MIPS if you pay for them.. Example: the Nokia N8x0 devices...
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Re:Flash won't be here soon (Score:5, Interesting)
Flash animations, and Flash Video are two very different things, and almost entirely separate.
FLV is already supported everywhere, thanks to libavcodec. You just need to parse the SWF player and find the actual file to play.
SWF animations, however, require a full-fledged player, and won't be supported. Still, how big of an issue is that going to be? Are there many websites out there that provide no alternative to their SWF menus?
For games, and the like, there is a standalone SWF player for MIPS Linux (found on similar portables--see my recent posts), which would trivially allow SWF animations launched by web pages to be played separate from the browser.
So that's a fairly narrow case of SWF that doesn't work on this sytem, and I suppose that might be worked around as well by somehow sending feedback between the standalone SWF player and the browser.
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A feature, not a bug (Score:5, Funny)
No flash? That's a feature, not a bug!
Wake me when they ship (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wake me when they ship (Score:5, Funny)
Color me unimpressed.
I too refuse to be satisfied until it comes with my happy meal.
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Re:Wake me when they ship (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no doubt it's possibly vaporware.
But, there are 2 things to consider. 1. The model they displayed is 120--not too far off from 100, really. 2. The 98 model is due out in october, which is one month away. It might be that it is perpetually 1 month away, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt until november.
The real question for me is the usefulness of it. That thing looks like it's slightly larger than a Nintendo DS, which is pretty small. I'm wondering just how easy this thing will be to use, or if I'll have to resort to hunt and peck, or thumbing the keyboard to type in what I want.
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where to get one? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the hardware stats (Score:5, Informative)
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
I'll believe that they "have arrived"... (Score:5, Insightful)
...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.
Sub-$100 (Score:5, Funny)
Which is even MORE amazing since the dollar is worth HALF what it was 5 years ago!!!
Notes on MIPS machines (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:5, Informative)
Out of interest, it's a 32-bit XBurst CPU from Ingenic Semiconductors.
http://www.ingenic.cn/eng/productServ/XBurst/pfCustomPage.aspx
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-1, Troll (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:5, Informative)
No precompiled apps to download,
Yeah, there's only a little over 20,000 precompiled MIPS packages here [debian.org]. (Well, technically, somewhere in here [debian.org], with an index located here [debian.org].) I tend to think that 20,000+ is a little bit more than zero, but maybe that's just me. :)
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Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:5, Funny)
What are you talking about, 20,000 has 4 zeros in it!
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Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:5, Funny)
And four zeros is more than (one) zero. I rest my case. :)
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Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:4, Informative)
I take it you never heard of Debian? They have precompiled binaries for pretty much every current processor architecture, including MIPS.
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Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:4, Funny)
True, but all it takes is a source repository, a cross compiler, and a huge botnet to turn things around.
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Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:5, Informative)
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...
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Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:5, Informative)
There are lots of MIPS Linux distros [linux-mips.org] (Main Page [linux-mips.org]), 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.
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Re:Flashlessness kills it (Score:5, Interesting)
The iphone doesn't run flash and it costs twice as much. No one will ever buy one!
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Re:Flashlessness kills it (Score:4, Informative)
The iPhone's got its own YouTube player [apple.com].
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Re:Flashlessness kills it (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:heh.. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:heh.. (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed! Phones and netbooks will help us eradicate Flash from the Web!
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Re:heh.. (Score:5, Funny)
No offense, but please go die.
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Re:useable? (Score:5, Interesting)
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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Re:fp (Score:5, Funny)
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