Sub-$100 Laptops Have Finally Arrived 437
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."
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.
Re:Because the interweb is unreliable (Score:5, Funny)
"It has *real* Linux... looks like Linux, uhhh, some kind of Linux is here..."
Re:Because the interweb is unreliable (Score:5, Funny)
"some kind of Linux is here..."
New slogan for /.? Or at least new annoying meme?
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
Re:video resolution...bleh (Score:4, Informative)
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Actually I looked at the Video and it said RAM: 64M/128M
Re:video resolution...bleh (Score:4, Informative)
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?
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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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...
Either way it's a massive amount of memory.
Re:video resolution...bleh (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe lower-resolution devices really are on the usage upswing.
Re:video resolution...bleh (Score:5, Funny)
Is that a "Too Many Pixels" error?
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Luckily not, what with the popularity of all these small laptops and mobile phones, i think the days of browsing with a small window will soon get better. What i do hate tho are fixed width sites, sometimes i want to browse using a small window, sometimes i want to browse using a wide screen...
Re:video resolution...bleh (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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?
Re:video resolution...bleh (Score:4, Informative)
...and have a working power supply and battery that lasts longer than 10 minutes.
The market for old laptops is saturated. The bottleneck are power supplies (I wonder why...) and batteries (long dead).
I could get a decent 800MHZ 1024x768 screen laptop without a power supply for, like, $40.
Then I need to spend $30 for a new power supply, and I won't find a new battery, no matter where I look. And if I find it, either it will be long dead or cost at least $60.
Forget sub-$100 second-hand laptops as anything other than 'portable desktop'. They run fine on power supply, but they usually go so cheap because the batteries need to be replaced and the new ones cost marginally less than new laptops.
For (hopefully) the last time.. (Score:3, Informative)
Pointing out that there is a comparable alternative available on a one-at-a-time basis is *not a valid criticism of these products.
Pretend that GP, instead of just being a tweakhead who wants to fiddle with a UMPC, is tasked with fitting out 1200 employees with cheap laptops.
I assume you'd suggest that he needs to make 1199 more friends with old laptops?
heh.. (Score:3, Interesting)
A pc for under 100$ and a shiny phone for over 400$. both made in china.
Re:heh.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:heh.. (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed! Phones and netbooks will help us eradicate Flash from the Web!
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There, fixed it for Aldous and Shakespeare.
Let it be known that even the greatest writers in history are not beyond the arrogance of a Slashdot AC. Along with the dreadful and degrading words: 'There, fixed it for you.'
Re:heh.. (Score:5, Funny)
No offense, but please go die.
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And, for tho
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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This [thebackbutton.com] which is linked to from here [adobe.com] seems to say something...
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Negative.
Gnash is based on GameSWF. Swfdec is based on...swfdec.
For why don't they work together ... they do. See this interview [gnashdev.org] for more information.
Re:Flash won't be here soon (Score:4, Interesting)
Thanks for the link, great interview with Rob Savoye of the Gnash project. For the impatient: anyone who's ever installed the Flash player plugin can't work on Gnash, which is quite a heavy restriction. If Adobe lifted this it would really help Gnash a lot more than releasing specs that Gnash figured out some years ago.
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...
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.
Re:Flash won't be here soon (Score:4, Informative)
Don't really need flash for those video sites like youtube, and most everything else is just advertising - check out this info about how to download the videos as mp4 files:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/04/download-youtube-videos-as-mp4-files.html [blogspot.com]
In the comments there are a lot of sites listed that will automate the process for you.
Flashlessness kills it (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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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The iphone doesn't run flash and it costs twice as much. No one will ever buy one!
When you buy a computer smaller than your hand you pretty much accept you won't get a full browsing experience out of it. Not so with a netbook, which despite its size is still basically a cheap laptop, and comes with laptop expectations.
To me the interesting thing about the rise of the netbooks is that they mark the death of the upgrade cycle that Microsoft and Intel have fed off for many years. Basically you're getting a laptop with the power of a four year old model, but lightweight, cheap, and with a
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Umm, what's it run then? Youtube seems to work.
Re:Flashlessness kills it (Score:4, Informative)
The iPhone's got its own YouTube player [apple.com].
Re:Flashlessness kills it (Score:4, Insightful)
He's not silencing you (as evidenced by the fact that your post did not, in fact, disappear), just rightfully calling it crap.
The deliberate confusion of "censor" and "criticize" is the first resort of the thin-skinned idiot.
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Gnash has already been ported to MIPS, so has Swfdec. See my above post. [slashdot.org] I definitely agree though, at the moment Gnash (and to a lesser extent Swfdec) are not a good substitute for Adobe Flash.
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Ah, no Flash, eh? This feature list just gets better and better. How did they keep Flash off of it? Apple figured out how to block it from iPhone, and if they could just figure out how to block it out of OS X, their marketshare would undoubtedly spike. I just wish those malware writers could find something better to do with their time instead of Flashing us with the 3rd Great Scourge of the Internet, after spam and viruses.
Re:Flashlessness kills it (Score:5, Funny)
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But seriously, if this can log onto a webdav partition, and run LaTeX, it might be a serious writing machine, akin to the Tandy 200 that was my mainstay for so long. It certainly runs OO.org, which allows one to make presentations, that
A feature, not a bug (Score:5, Funny)
No flash? That's a feature, not a bug!
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The lack of a webcam is also a feature.
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.
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.
They *are* shipping. (Score:4, Interesting)
I still don't understand OLPC (Score:3, Interesting)
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Bah, the problem was too much press. If they had just quietly done what they wanted to do, they would have gotten the sales they needed without Intel and Microsoft butting in. But no, NN had to go toot his horn.
Uptake Hampered by Non-x86 Architecture (Score:2, Flamebait)
Although the laptop is probably a great piece of engineering for something that has a sub-$100 price tag, the decision to go with a MIPS processor is probably going to relegate the device to niche markets - census taking, for example, or maybe something along the lines of inventory control.
The lack of official (and I emphasize "official") Flash 9 and Adobe PDF support would probably be a deal breaker for Joe Average Home and Business user.
Granted, a most of the PDF spec is now available royalty-free, and an
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Whilst I agree that non-official flash is a bad thing, non-official pdf software is (IMHO) far superior to the adobe offerings.
Foxit (which won't be on MIPS) is a great, lightweight reader. And whatever came with my linux distros (debian, ubuntu and redhat) works just as well.
I don't think Joe average is that bothered about pdf either, personally, not bothered enough that it has to be adobe.
MIPS is cool. My router runs on MIPS, as does my PSP. I have three linux on ARM devices, a linux on PPC and a couple o
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I don't think Joe Average or any business user is going to touch this laptop. IMHO, it's meant for the low-end of the market - young kids and old folks. It's perfect for them.
where to get one? (Score:5, Interesting)
Tagged !arrived (Score:2)
"Sub-$100 Laptops Have Finally Arrived"
Tagged !arrived...
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
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you're willing to pay double that, you can in fact buy practically the exact laptop they have described:
http://www.compsource.com/pn/3KRZ40074GB/3k_Computers_2340/ [compsource.com]
Both hardware and software appear to match the description perfectly.
Don't count on it... (Score:2)
I think it's extremely safe to say this is completely vaporware hype, with no substance at all.
Laptops that just about exactly match the specs and description of this supposed $100 machine, currently retail for $250:
http://www.compsource.com/pn/3KRZ40074GB/3k_Computers_2340/ [compsource.com]
I fail to believe it's being sold at a 100% mark-up, or that any magic they can do in the next couple years is going to half the materials and production costs of a laptop.
It looks like a decent bit of hardware, but don't count on it get
There is nothing "super" about losing freedom. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Sub-$100 (Score:5, Funny)
Which is even MORE amazing since the dollar is worth HALF what it was 5 years ago!!!
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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.
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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.
One of the main interesting things about RISC architectures is that all instructions are the same length, which means that the memory management circuitry can be much simpler. Variable length instructions add a lot of complexity. OTOH, what really got rid of the advantage of RISC was increased L1 cache sizes and the way that the memory bus didn't get faster nearly as quickly as CPUs did. (I know someone who designed a superscalar RISC processor, and the real complexity of going superscalar was dealing with
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>If you're willing to go superscalar, the simplicity goes away, and so does the advantage of the MIPS architecture.
And so does *a part* of the advantage of the MIPS architecture: I bet than a superscalar MIPS is still much simpler than a superscalar x86..
As for the second part, there is now a MIPS16 variant, so it's possible to have MIPS with 16/32 bit instructions, of course the decoder becomes more complex, but x86 instructions are still far more complicated (I can't remember what's the maximum size of
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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Yeah, the spec says 30Gb.
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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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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.
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.
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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It's a head in the cloud.
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Actually....
This looks like a perfect platform for Angstrom
angstrom-distribution.org
Lots of apps, and more machines like this the better. Fro $98 I expect this will sell like crazy. Beats the crap out of a Sharp Zaurus....
Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:5, Insightful)
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
-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.
Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:4, Informative)
(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.
Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:5, Interesting)
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. :)
Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:5, Funny)
What are you talking about, 20,000 has 4 zeros in it!
Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:5, Funny)
And four zeros is more than (one) zero. I rest my case. :)
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.
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.
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...
Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:4, Insightful)
To the grandparent, I think you'll find lots of precombiled binaries to download for MIPS [openbsd.org].
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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No, he's right. He got the first post... in China's Timezone.
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Why does China need more than one timezone? Who cares what the numbers on the clock say?
The numbers on the clock are stupidly arbitrary anyway -- few people wake up at 0:00.
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There's plenty of folding USB keyboards, like this one. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000EU01GO/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=2380150919&ref=pd_sl_21k505pcmf_e [amazon.com]
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.
Re:fp (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.