AMD Geode Internet Appliance 186
Justin Davidow writes "For a new twist on internet appliances, AMD is finally attempting to go mainstream with their mobile Geode processor, with the Personal Internet Communicator (PIC), a stand-alone device that allows users a striped down laptop/inflated PDA (without a screen included!) for internet surfing.
Expected retail price: $299USD." Be cool to play around with - I'd love to test it out.
Expected retail price: $299USD." Be cool to play around with - I'd love to test it out.
As seen in the RatShack flyer... (Score:5, Informative)
Monthy circular image [shoplocal.com]
"You've got questions - we've got cellphones" -- and now, not-cheap-enough computers, too.
Compulsory Windoze (Score:5, Informative)
*plonk*
When is someone going to start selling some decent Linux portables? (I know, Nokia's 770... some time later this year.)
Re:no screen? (Score:5, Informative)
- Dr. O
For Those Who've Forgotten (Score:5, Informative)
Introduction [slashdot.org]
and
Initial Commentary & Photos [slashdot.org]
Relatively poor deal (Score:3, Informative)
Probably good for the granny squad (anyone heard of a WinCE virus?) but not so great for anyone who wants to use consumer applications. At least you can install regular Windows or x86 Linux on it if needs be.
Compared to the spec of the Mac Mini that costs only $100 more though, this suffers by 30gb less disk space, 884mhz less processor cycles, a quarter the RAM.. and a lot of coolness.
Re:no screen? (Score:3, Informative)
Well, without a screen it certainly can't be called a "stripped down laptop/inflated PDA). More like a headless box.
Re:no screen? (Score:4, Informative)
Apparently so. They also expect you to pay the same amount as the lowest-end Dell desktop (which, a few months ago, actually shipped with a 15-inch CRT monitor and an inkjet printer).
try again (Score:3, Informative)
Category 1
Discovered on: July 17, 2004
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/ven
The rest of the story (Score:2, Informative)
Apparently Radio Shack thinks they can offer it up for lease in the US in a market where a full size PC costs 220 to 340 dollars (linux vs windows at walmart). I would imagine this involves leasing them to a market they hope exists for a robust, if severely limited computing platform.
They might be right, there is probably some value in a computer that can't be buggered by the user.
Re:no screen? (Score:3, Informative)
Little info on the processor... (Score:4, Informative)
I have a Geode 300mhz SBPC myself.. with a 1Gig CF card running DSL Linux on it. But it is in a big, bulky industrial case right now.
It runs nice, if not a little sluggish with some larger aplications.
I like the case AMD is showing... I wonder if I can make something similar.
PC for developing nations (Score:4, Informative)
As an Internet appliance, this doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell: it's too expensive, too big, too ugly, and it runs the wrong kind of software.
Probably the main reason it missed its target is its operating system--Windows is far too heavyweight. Companies like Linksys have no trouble putting out $50 Linux systems like the WRT 54G; if they replaced the wireless on that box with video out, you'd have the hardware for an Internet appliance.
Why, how very novel (Score:3, Informative)
The only thing that's really novel about this is the integrated video, and having some (possibly lobotomized version of) Windows pre-installed. Otherwise, this isn't exactly a remarkable technological development.
Also seconding the "how could they make this and not include a display" question. The boards I cited above are intended for embedded development, and I've never used a monitor on any of them. (I've got probably fifty of them, all running various customized Linux and BSD distributions, scattered over four counties in my network. They're intended to be used that way, which is why they don't even have a VGA port.)
Seriously, once you add a monitor, you're pretty close to low-end Dell pricing, which gives you a computer with roughly 20 times the raw horsepower, and a lot more versatility, so I suppose they're marketing this to the "omg computers are scary" crowd. Best of luck on that. I'd like to think at this point the American public is smarter than this, but I'm probably setting myself up for another disappointment.
These aren't meant for the SFF market (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Compulsory Windoze (Score:4, Informative)
No hard drive required.
The way the system works is by either PXE or etherboot(assuming the BIOS supports it). What happens is that when the machine boots up it makes a dhcp request and is told where to pull down a linux kernel. It does an NFS mount to the server and then starts a remote X session. All applications are run on the LTSP server. Very little CPU and RAM is required by the thin client.
I currenlty have an install with about 50 thin clients running on a dual 2.8 xeon. Works great.
Thin clients with no moving parts would last for a long time and have zero maintenance.
My experience with a Geode box (Score:5, Informative)
Through a local small computer company with ties to AMD, I've been beta testing AMD's GX Thin Client [amd.com] product, which is based on a Geode GX 533 processor (which runs at 400MHz). Granted, this isn't the exact product listed in the story, but it's built on the same platform and only seems to differ, really, in that the Thin Client doesn't include a hard drive.
The first thing one notices about the Thin Client is its size. It's small. Most hardcover novels are considerably larger than the Thin Client. Most Linksys routers are larger than the Thin Client.
The Thin Client includes flash memory for storage (128MB, if I recall), which you can take out and replace with a CompactFlash card (using the provided adapter). The Thin Client I received included a version of Windows XP Embedded and Windows CE. The performance under XP Embedded was surprisingly poor. Simply moving a window around the screen rapidly could bring the system to its knees. Windows CE, however, was pretty responsive but ultimately not very useful.
On the bright side, it runs Linux. Just load up a slim distro (Debian Base, Slackware, Damn Small Linux, etc.) onto a CF card with the appropriate drivers (which AMD doesn't yet publish on their site--I got them from one of the project leaders--but I'm sure they'll be available once the Thin Client hits the market). It works swimmingly.
Now for a bit of bad news: the Thin Client only has USB 1.1 ports, so you're limited to ~11Mbps transfer speeds over USB. It has built-in 10/100 Ethernet, but you'll never hit anywhere near 100Mbps. The processor becomes your bottleneck when it comes to any kind of network utilization. (I never seem to get above 15Mbps.) File transfers will be limited by the R/W speed of the CF card. I would not expect to use this kind of device for anything multimedia-related, nor anything that requires even moderate processing power.
But the Geode does shine in one area that's very important to me: power consumption. The processor draws about 6W under an average load. In standby, it draws less than 1W. (The rest of the system draws a few more watts, of course.) This is important to me because I have a couple of sites (I work for a WISP) that run off of wind and solar power. Since the Geode consumes less power than the average night light, I can plug it into one of those sites and not worry about it. I wouldn't even consider putting an EPIA-based machine at one of those sites--it would drain the batteries in just a few hours.
The Geode isn't very good at running a GUI or any processor-intensive application. It is, however, good at running services like Apache, Nagios, and others.
I think AMD is marketing these devices to the wrong crowd--they shouldn't be general-purpose computers for the third-world (the $100 laptop would put this to shame in terms of value). It should, however, be marketed to network geeks who need monitoring and testing tools at various locations across their network. No other device comes close in terms of cost and power consumption.
I plan on buying dozens of the Thin Clients once they hit the market. They might not be perfect in every way (the processor-limited network transfers bug me), but they do have their uses.