CEO of Centaur Discusses x86 Strategy and Linux 135
An anonymous reader writes "This fascinating interview with Glenn Henry, founder of VIA processor subsidiary Centaur Technology, discusses the founding of Centaur, its strategy and products, and why Linux is fundamental to his company's success. Additional topics covered include: how to produce an x86 clone with a few million dollars and a few dozen engineers; the embedded x86 market, and how it compares to the traditional ARM and MIPS based embedded market; why Centaur doesn't compete with AMD and Intel so much as enable x86 to reach new markets; how Linux is enabling greater hardware functionality; the urgent need for pervasive security -- and much more!"
Wondering (Score:5, Interesting)
Wouldn't it be MORE profitable for companies like the aforementioned Netgear to do this? What am I not seeing? Centaur: help us out!
Re:Wondering (Score:3, Informative)
Open source designs? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you standardize the equipment, then you will drive prices down, and you won't be stuc
Re:Open source designs? (Score:4, Informative)
It's throw-away lock-in. Same thing that happened to Televisions and VCRs 20 years ago. Standardizing the parts and interfaces won't help - the labor required is simply too time conssuming.
Laptops are amazingly upgradable, and even those are less and less apt to be worth the time required. You mention driver circuits, but really - there are somewhere around 80 different driver circuits in current use for laptop displays. Yet, there are some 500 laptop models out there. And without the the driver circuit, the Liquid Crystal display is far cheaper than an integrated unit would be. So, I think that part of your argument is counter-productive. LCD + accompanying driver costs a lot more money, yes. However, the video card hardware can be configured to talk to most of the driver circuits (they are close to standarized at the interface level). Again - it's just a lot of work.
When you don't have the 90% air that most PC chasis hold, you can't have big bulky large finger capable standard connectors between every part. Sometimes, you have to route your signals through flat cables or custom bundles.
Really that pain-in-the-ass to price point is even hitting PCs. Once a computer is more than 3 years out of date, it actually becomes cheaper to simply buy a package deal. If you really liked your case, swap it, the case was free with the bundle - along with yet another floppy and CD-ROM. As prices drop, the three years will turn to 6 months. Or about the same period between major CPU/architecture performance boosts.
Re:Open source designs? (Score:3, Interesting)
As an example, I have an IBM thinkpad 380Z with a broken lcd cable. Simple enough, right? Replace the cable. They're mostly standard connectors. Except the cable has a variety of surface mounts on it, and can only be replaced with a $125 replacement cable. If it didn't have the surface mounts, I could use an old IDE cable to replace it. If it had a driver circuit that wasn't built onto the mainboard, I'
Re:Open source designs? (Score:2)
You either buy the part, 05K2765, that's broken, or you repair or fabricate the part yourself.
Using wire and a soldering iron ($12 if you don't own one).. Depending on the purpose of the surface mounts, I'll bet I could fabricate it in just less than the time to money ratio. The current part is probably repairable, with carefull enough hands, for even less.
However, the "surface mounts" also speak to the - no room in such a small c
the other option (Score:2)
If what you want is a working 380 laptop there ya go. Why anyone would want such a dead end machine, though, is beyond me. At least the relatively power hungry 600 can be upgraded to nearly 1GHz and a good bit of ram using standard parts... those old 3 series are just... portable i-openers: underpowered, but "too good to throw a
Re:Open source designs? (Score:2)
Re:Wondering (Score:2)
To some extent VIA does provide this. Their Mini-ITX and Nano-ITX motherboards are the core for a good network appliance. You just need to add a decent case, hard drive, etc. -- But, buying a good small case with power supply is harder than it should be. There are many options available to OEMs for large purchases, but the selection for hobbyists is relatively small.
The available Mini-ITX and Nano-ITX cases are also fairly expensive relative to ATX cases. I guess VI
Can Centaur beat 27W? (Score:2)
I use a 50MHz 486, bundled in a very old Compaq Contura laptop, to power my main home NAT gateway. It runs OpenBSD, and the power supply says it draws 27W (the LCD is disabled, so I assume it's much lower). What Centaur configuration beats this on power consumption?
While the gateway runs sendmail, httpd, and I use pine on it occasionally, it is still tolerably fast (bittorrent seems to slow down the NAT). However, I'm thinking of adding some WiFi components, and I fear that the 486's max performance will
Via Eden...Gumstix (Score:2)
If pocket PC/zaurus modding is what you want check out Gumstix.com. It's an intel XScale processor 200 or 400MHz with 64Mb ram. It's ultra tiny but still really, really new
Is x86 the best chip to use (Score:5, Interesting)
Although, I'll admit some of those embedded boards that I have seen are pretty cool and easy to use.
P.S. I know I can't spell. That's why I'm not an english teacher.
Re:Is x86 the best chip to use (Score:5, Informative)
It works, engineers and coders are familiar with it.. The embedded world is still largely about ASM routines and tight little loops that dont leave the cache, etc, etc.. You can write and test your fancy-shamcy hand-assembled routine at your leisure on your desktop computer.... There are plenty of upsides, and the only downside is the "other stuff looks better on paper" argument.
It's a newcomer to the embedded world, but will no doubt take a strong hold.
Re:Is x86 the best chip to use (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really. There isn't much assembly necessary on a modern embedded platform. Even the little 4- and 8-bit processors have specialized C compilers available. Assembly is necessary for startup but that's about it; then we just jump to main(). I think Windows game programmers write more assembly than most embedded systems folks do.
Embedded systems development is just like any other development. How can I get the best product out as quickly as I can? ASM doesn't get me there quickly enough.
That's why using embedded x86 can be a good fit. It may not be the best technical solution, but we'll get to market quickly because the tools and available leveragable source is so good.
ASM (Score:3, Informative)
Not really. There isn't much assembly necessary on a modern embedded platform.
Ditto. I have only really used asm in two or three places in embedded projects. One is in the initial bootloader. The second is in instances where the compiler won't do what I want. The third is to access special instructions that the compiler doesn't know about (eg, eieio on the PPC). The second and third instances can't mostly be dealt with inline asm and cpp macros, and gcc make this a lot easier if you have access to i
There are real advantages, too (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't just look better on paper. A cleaner architecture results in a simpler chip, meaning lower power consumption, cost, heat production, and smaller die size. Those things matter to embedded devices, and thus MIPS or ARM would be a better fit than x86.
What x86 has going for it is that it is much more abundant. The chips are produced in higher volume, making them easier and cheaper to get, it's
Re:Is x86 the best chip to use (Score:2)
If VIA makes a system-on-a-chip before any ARM fab can, and still deliver acceptable performance (in terms of speed, power consumption, IO, etc) then I'd say VIA would clearly win a round in terms of market share.
I think it's good that VIA is trying to be flexible and make powerful enough chips to do anything an embedded designer or a low-end computer house needs.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Is x86 the best chip to use (Score:1)
With Via's CPUs, some functionality, like encryption and random number generation, are supported by the kernel, which then makes the functionality available to userland in ways that don't require the software to explicitly support Via's CPU.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Is x86 the best chip to use (Score:2)
However, for embedded systems, you will likely not need or even want any of these.
``On top of which, as long as it runs ix86, platforms with the chip will not be limited to Linux.''
I don't really see what you mean...you can also usually run NetBSD. If you mean: you can't run Windows, why, yes, there are loads of platforms that Win
Re:Is x86 the best chip to use (Score:5, Interesting)
- My Linux development PC runs x86 so stuff compiles/runs on my development machine will tftp over to my embedded board and run immediately.
- The GNU x86 toolchain is WAY easier to use than the cross GCC tools. All GNU (Linux kernel and gcc especially) projects target x86 first and everyone plays catchup. Bugs are found/fixed in x86 first. Features work on x86 first.
Reasons to move from x86 to ARM.
- ARM is designed as an embedded CPU and x86 is designed as a desktop CPU. So the ARM has a very simple memory map, you don't have to worry about working around 15 year old cruft (why the foo doesn't a modern x86 boot straight to protected mode?).
- It's hard to find an x86, even one ostensibly designed for the embedded market, without the "kitchen sink" problem. Our product with >500 parts with an SiS x86 dropped to 300 with an Atmel AT91 ARM. Most of the passive parts on the SiS board were to turn OFF crap we didn't need (IDE controller, SD controller, video controller and so forth).
- ARM is cheaper. ARM is smaller. ARM uses less power. ARM is cooler (temperature). ARM is cooler (it's a very nifty chip design).
Just my opinions, lightly flavored with experience.
Re:Is x86 the best chip to use (Score:3, Informative)
The new version (it's not on the web yet, but they are shipping in limited quantities) includes on chip: 4 Mbyte Flash, 16 Mbyte SDRAM, an Ethernet transceiver, Reset circuitry, and dozens of passives (resistors and capacitors), and all the usual: 4 Serial UARTS, a parallel port, SPI bus, etc.
So if you wanted to build a credit-card sized Linux machine with Ethernet, BOA webserver, SSH
Re:Is x86 the best chip to use (Score:2)
Re:Is x86 the best chip to use (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Is x86 the best chip to use (Score:4, Insightful)
Give PPC a try. I love my LinuxPPC machines, they're wonderful. I honestly fell in love with the PPC in college, first in real world x86 emulation (VirtualPC) and then in Computer Architecture and Computer Hardware Design. It's a lovely architecture, and you can see its low power uses in the iBook. I've read that the 750 in the iBook used less power than the southbridge, but I don't have references to back that up. Suffice it to say, the PPCs have been traditionally pretty low power, and have pretty good desktop acceptance as far as non-x86 processors go on desktop machines.
After you get through the base packages of a useful distro, like Debian or a multitude of others, you'll start to find x86 only packages-- retail packages usually don't even acknowledge that Linux runs on non-x86 hardware! Is x86 compatible really the architecture to target for Linux acceptance? If I didn't love PPC and have a source of cheap old Macs, I'd rather be running a VIA / Cyrix derivative because of how cool they run. Since the Pentium class, x86 hasn't been about the native instruction set, it's been about the state machine that re-orders, re-names and actually issues native instructions on a pretty nice, flexible RISC inside anyway. So, Centaur's problem is basically updating their RISC core and keeping their x86 runtime emulator tuned. That way you don't have to bend anybody's mindset to make packages for some off the wall architecture, or beat another architecture at their own game.
Re:Is x86 the best chip to use (Score:5, Interesting)
PPC is nicer than X86 but it's hardly a "lovely architecture." In fact, it's one of the uglier RISC designs.
- Backwards bit numbering scheme. The MSB is referred to as bit 0. Normally, it's just a matter of convention and makes no difference but there is some inconsistency in the ISA about this. For example, shift counts are stored in the 5 LSBs but indirect segment register indices appear in the upper 5 bits (probably because of the MSB convention.)
- Some really complex instructions which increase processor complexity. Rotate-with-masked-insertion? That's not RISC. IBM's POWER chips actually need to break down some of the instructions into smaller ops, similar to X86.
- Flags. It's nice that most flag computations are optional and are only done if explicitly requested, but flags don't belong in a RISC architecture. The way PPC implements them is even more complicated than on most CISC machines: A flag register with 8 4-bit CC fields and additional flags in a separate XER register! (??)
- A bizarre MMU. The paging scheme isn't as efficient as other architectures, even including X86. Apparently this is IBM legacy cruft from a previous architecture (possibly S360, can't remember.)
As far as RISC architectures go, Alpha was probably the best by far, and the actual implementation was great starting with the EV6.
Re:Is x86 the best chip to use (Score:4, Insightful)
This discussion is perhaps more suited to ArsTechnica, as the issue at hand is whether or not x86 is the best instruction set for a low power budget chip maker to pursue. I hope you don't hold that Alpha would be a more suitable instruction set for that -- I don't even want to think of what packages aren't available for Alpha, let alone ask a vendor for a program ported to my "Alpha-Compatible". Academically speaking, however, I will reply to your PowerPC attacks. Regretfully, all my college textbooks are 300 miles away, and I have not looked through my senior textbooks in 5 years, so my rebuttal cannot cite specific Alpha shortfalls beyond anecdotal recollection.
4 precise detractors against the PPC ommitted, I concede that these are 4 of very many
Reference [theinquirer.net]Make no mistake, I make no claims about the Alpha deserving the fate that we all foresaw when DEC made the deal with the Devil. Alpha had its share of problems (remember the quick race to 500MHz, then the hard stop for a long time while they straightened out their unbuffered cross chip clock signal?). The RISC/CISC debate ended long ago when Intel effectively merged them. Since then, the two different schools have borrowed from each other so much that we expect chips to have some cruft to reflect their original intents. For this reason, we'll see all Itanium derivatives reflecting that they were made for pre-defined behavior where a compiler can make predictions of the instruction ordering, and likely this will continue to be in intensely predictable math operations. At this time, anyone who insists that modern PPC, x86, Alpha or Sparc chips are exclusively RISC or CISC hasn't taken the time to realize that there is a very blurry line between the RISC and CISC lately. Many have argued that this line is effectively erased and that the definitions have only had meaning in college courses for the past decade.
The Alpha may be your ultimately pure holy processor, but I will continue to find PPC to be a great balance between theory and real world needs and heritage. If nothing else, x86 has taught us that we can have incredibly high performance architectures based on 1970s vintage processors like the 4004.
I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
Though licensing for the abandon-ware would be a pain. As would trying to standardize the input across a large number of games. But still, it would be friggin' cool to play leisure suit larry while you are bored in class!
Re:I wonder (Score:1)
Re:I wonder (Score:4, Interesting)
It's too bad that the companies who made those games either:
a) don't exist anymore or
b) don't want to open source the games even though there is almost no chance of the games bringing any more revenue.
Re:I wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
Look up the stats on the GBA, It runs at less than 20 MHz.
-Jesse, unhappy at both hardware and software bloat, returning to the "good ole' days".
Re:I wonder (Score:1)
Why do people think a game needs a 3.6ghz processor? It's all about the capabilities of the video chipset, and I've been reading a lot about ATI's forays into embedded video lately.
Re:I wonder (Score:2)
Re:I wonder (Score:2)
Re:I wonder (Score:2)
there was such a device proto linked from slashdot couple of months back.
it looked like crap.
Re:I wonder (Score:1)
This is being done...as mentioned in the interview (Score:2, Informative)
Going after a different market (Score:4, Insightful)
The more competition the better we the consumers are at getting the best products.
Re:Going after a different market (Score:2)
That depends. If competition becomes about who can cut the most corners and deliver the best price, the consumers sometimes lose there too. For example, consumer electronics used last decades but it seems that three years is about the average of what you can expect now, at best, the Chinese brands seem to be shorter yet.
Re:Going after a different market (Score:2)
Reminded me Transmeta (Score:2, Interesting)
I am assuming their product did not make too much inroads into the industry otherwise I would have expected to hear about their products before this time and from 95 till 04, it is anawful long time to stay in hiatus.
Re:Reminded me Transmeta (Score:1)
I've been considering building a box or two using their parts because they're fanless and, on my Linux boxes, I don't need a lot in the way of power because they're office, web, email, text editing boxes. Hell, their 1GHz part is good enough to do a lot
Re:Reminded me Transmeta (Score:1, Insightful)
These guys certainly have an advantage over Transmeta in that they are tied to VIA and as such have chipset and motherboard support. Transmeta fell on it's face in part because they just did the processor and not the associated chipsets. But processors witho
Re:Reminded me Transmeta (Score:2)
Centaur's and Transmeta's history really have very little in common. In Centaur's case, Glenn set out to do an x86 processor because it would be fun. He wanted to do a simple design managable be a small group using ideas he had developed over a long period of time. The relatively poor performance was a consequence of Glenn believing that superscalar and floating point are works of the devil.
Transmeta approached the problem with deep pockets an
Re:Reminded me Transmeta (Score:2)
As for not having Linux on the mind that was a HUGE mistake on their part...Absolutely HUGE!! Their processor and the tech to make it x86 like is remarkable...on the fly emmulation...they could do anything! on demand....but they should have done their OWN at some point.
centar (Score:4, Interesting)
A 2 GHz machine that is x86 compatible but will it have all those nifty other features that windows can use to speed it up? If not, it would be much slower than AMD and Intel.
Although, the thought of being able to use a chip like that for some embedded app would be pretty neat and pretty powerful because you don't need all the extra stuff that windows uses.
Re:centar (Score:1)
I haven't read a comparison in some time, but if I remember these chips are fairly competetive for everyday use, but their floating point is kinda weak.
Interesting trend (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder if it's a case of corporate "me too!" or if all the small firms were simply waiting for some large firm (IBM for example) to thumb their corporate nose at Microsoft, before they decided it was safe to do so.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for firms being able to decide who to attach their sail to, I was just wondering why it was taking until now...
Re:Interesting trend (Score:1, Informative)
April Fools? (Score:2, Insightful)
"We started officially on Apr. 1, 1995, the day the check came in the mail, an auspicious date."
I don't know why, but I found that amusing...
Out of skew (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Out of skew (Score:2)
Re:Out of skew (Score:2)
Re:Out of skew (Score:2)
Oops - speed typo ! (Score:2)
Hope no potential buyers are put off by this - it must be sweet in a laptop, where power conservation is critical. That said, do VIA have a chipset to take advantage of the head start given them by the processor?
Transmeta (Score:2)
Unless we are talking about a totally different line here from the Epia's. This looks like it could be it.
But if it's related to the epia's then it's almost worthless. Last time i checked the epia's performance it was had half the performance of a celeron at similar levels.
Your better off with a mobile athlon xp (the 35 watt mobils, standard mobils are the 45 watt) permanently underclocked significantly (to 600mhz-1 ghz or so) and if possible with the voltage lo
Bench's To Provide Evidence (Score:2)
Re:Bench's To Provide Evidence (Score:3, Informative)
Since then they've come out with the C3 "Nehemiah" which has a full speed FPU and has a 266MHz bus. They've gotten somewhat faster; although, I don't have any benchmarks for you.
Yep they're dog slow! (Score:2)
Re:Oops - speed typo ! (Score:2)
My experience in simply replacing a via chipset motherboard, with a NForce2 chipset motherboard is that the twice weekly lockups during video capture experienced on the Via chipset completely disappeared on the NForce2 chipset, using the very same video capture cards, hard drives, video card etc.
Even when I used an SIIG IDE card to drive the hard drives I still ran into problems, indicating th
Nice strategy but... (Score:2)
The price of the VIA boards is impressive, however they need to consider system costs... because they are using a less-usual form factor many customers are faced with excessive costs for supporting bits-n-bobs. Many case/PSU combinations are more e
Re:Nice strategy but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nice strategy but... (Score:2)
I've looked at my $39 mini-atx case and it appears the mounting holes for a mini-itx board line up with holes already drilled on the mounting plate.
NEVER! (Score:1)
now... (Score:1)
I Wish for RISC (Score:3, Interesting)
Sadly, the nice, small boards and CPUs that I would like to have are hard to come by, and you pay a price penalty for that. Then, the next best thing is a sort of mainstream x86 line that aims for the same goals, and that's exactly what Centaur is doing (and Transmeta, although they seem to have failed to satisfy even themselves).
So, if anyone knows where to get cheap RISC systems (a few hundred euros tops) in the Netherlands, please tell me.
Gotta pimp it out: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Gotta pimp it out: (Score:2)
Re:Gotta pimp it out: (Score:3, Informative)
BTW, remember to register the board for access to our FTP site where the latest releases of our Linux environment live.
Re:Gotta pimp it out: (Score:2)
I wish you had similar eval boards for chips higher up on the food chain, say the EP9302 and such.
Strange (Score:1, Funny)
I just can't understand why more people haven't done this!
Re:Strange (Score:2)
hmm (Score:1)
They have it backwards (Score:2)
The x86 has served us well, but it's time that old instruction set was retired. They should open up an interface into the RISC core of modern X86 processors. Let us write code directly to that, and eventually the CISC code will die out.
Re:They have it backwards (Score:2)
And BSD is dying too.
Nice try.
Re:They have it backwards (Score:2)
When AMD designed the x86-64 they considered adding registers, and did some worth. Eventually they added far less registers than expected, telling everyone that in the real world they were better off not exposing more to the real world, the processor could get better performance in the transllation unit than it could get by letting you use them.
Coz x86 will live. (Score:2)
Sure there's always something better, but it may only be better for _now_. Meanwhile there's something that works well enough and has a proven track record. BTW if Centaur vanishes, one could resort to AMD or Intel, without too much pain.
So far, most of the RISCs and other "elegant" CPUs have ended up embedded or buried. You have Sun, which is having obvious trouble with SPARC. So it's either x86 or IBM's POWER which
Great low power (thus heat & noise) processors (Score:3, Interesting)
The product we're shipping now, the C5P has a top speed of 1.4 to 1.5GHz, today, but the sweet spot is 1GHz. We have a fanless version at 1GHz. We also sell all the way down to 533 or even 400MHz, for low-power applications.
To give you an idea about the 1GHz version we're selling today, the worst case power -- not "typical" or "average" power, which other people talk about -- our worst case power is 7 watts, which is low enough to do fanless at 1GHz [story], and no one else can do that.
To do a fanless CPU in a small case, you really need to be under the 10 Watt range. Their CPU's do this nicely. Compare that to 80W+ for current Intel and AMD workstation processors. ( Intel's Pentium M has good power spec's, but it is very hard to find chips & boards for end user purchase. Most Pentium M boards are intended for embedded or industrial use, and are priced for OEM quantities). Add a 2.5" hard drive (at ~ 2.5 Watts vs. 15 Watts for a 3.5" drive) and you have a nice low power Linux server, which takes up very little space and can run almost silently.
I have been using an 800MHz C3 for about three years now. I run it fanless, with a big heat sink in a medium sized case. It has been completely reliable, and plenty fast for my DSL Linux services (WWW, SMTP, FTP, VPN, DNS, NTP, etc.) + LAN SMB services.
The rest of these questions (Score:2, Funny)
Future processor innovations? (Score:3, Interesting)
six months after we first started shipping our product with encryption in it [story], we have three or four operating systems, including Linux, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD
This is a really great capability.. hardware random number generation, and ridiculously fast AES crypto (VIA claimed 15Gbps AES. That's probably for on-cache data. But, it's screaming fast anyway).
Then, he give a little teaser about future CPUs:
Our next processor -- I haven't ever told anyone, so I won't say what it is -- but our next processor has even more things in it that I think will be just as quickly adopted by the open source software world, and provide even more value.
I wonder what this will be, more crypto - like public key accel, or a new direction? As an HTPC user, I would like to see some better multimedia capabilities. The MMX/SSE stuff is nice, but it doesn't cut it for the heavy lifting needed for HDTV MPEG2 processing, or WMV HD processing.
Re:Future processor innovations? (Score:2)
It's always bothered me that hardware can do so many things relatively easily and fast that aren't done today because there's no software to support it. We just decided to try to break the mold. We were going to do hardware that, literally, had no software support at the start. And now the software is there, in several variations, and people are starting to use it. I actually think that's only going to happen in the open source world.
I wonder how many fe
Re:Future processor innovations? (Score:2)
Via in particular is precarious because MS could really hurt them if they get too far out-of-line. Fortunately, they have a good 30%+ share of the chipset market so MS can't ignore them...but they s
Re:Future processor innovations? (Score:2)
FPGA? (Score:2)
Re:Future processor innovations? (Score:2)
Latter in the story he hinted that it would be RSA public key encryption. Hinted only though, so if it isn't don't be too surprized. Still if you are a betting guy it you could put money on it and call it a safe bet.
Re:Future processor innovations? (Score:2)
He said they did symmetric crypto (AES), Public Key (RSA), and a Hash function (RSA).
So, that chip would make a blazingly fast IPSec or SSL processor. Or, at least it would mean that IPSec processing and SSL would have a negligible hit on system load for most uses.
cheap laptops (Score:5, Insightful)
Desktops are a different story, you can always swap around parts and do a little drilling and cutting, etc to make anything fit, but laptops are teh sucks for upgrading and working on, more or less, and they are too expensive as they are sold now to change out very often (for me I mean, but bet a lot of other folks feel the same way). I'd get one and use it for my main desktop most of the time then with an external keyboard and my regular mouse and monitor, scrap energy hog desktops, but retain the option of true portability.
Not Midrange performance (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not Midrange performance (Score:3, Insightful)
Mobile Athlon on The desktop (Score:2)
The 35 watt can most likely be cooled with an ultra quiet fan.
I'm just pointing out that this ultra low end stuff. My system is currently 1.5 years old (i've lived without upgrading core components for several years).
You don't count (Score:2)
You could hop over to one of the surplus dealers and replace that raggedy pp200 with a box at
$500, 1ghz (Score:2)
Anyway, the $499 "laptop" that fits your description has been on the market for
Re:Not Midrange performance (Score:2)
The later generation "Nehemiah" C3's have a full speed FPU and a 266MHz bus. This should make them benchmark much better.
Re:cheap laptops (Score:2, Insightful)
Does anyone make a *new* laptop that uses this guys chips and a via mobo, and is it under 500 clams brand new?
-----
No, because laptops are expensive because of more than just the chip. LCDs make up a good portion of the cost of an inexpensive laptop. The engineering and design of laptops takes more money than a desktop because you have to worry about size, power consumption, and weight, three factors that aren't much of an issue with cut rate desktops. A 1 year support policy for a laptop costs mor
Re:cheap laptops (Score:2)
I doubt an individual can make a full-featured briefcase computer for that much.
BTW: There's no need to "toggle" speeds using a switch. There are applets to change a mobile CPU's speed dynam
Why x86? (Score:2)
Success (Score:3, Informative)
It immediately occured to me that this guy is very good at thinking out of the box. A processor company is not an easy thing to create, especially with a startup budget as low as 15 million US.
Now they have been through 5 major product revisions and are currently shipping 1GHz PIII compatible processors that don't need a fan.
Technically, I'm not laughing. Person
Re:the guy is blind - transmeta competes with them (Score:2)
Re:the guy is blind - transmeta competes with them (Score:2)