China to Make $125 PCs 172
TechFreep writes "A Chinese computer company hopes to sell low-cost PCs to schools and government agencies, but allegations of ripped-off processor designs might slow the effort. From the article:
'Chinese-based ZhongKe Menglan Electronics Technology Co. will produce several thousand low-cost PCs to distribute to schools and local governments. The PCs, which will initially sell for $150 to $175, will run on Linux and include 256Mb of RAM, a 40 or 60GB hard drive, and a Godson-2 CPU clocked between 800Mhz and 1Ghz. If initial sales of the product are successful ZhongKe will begin mass production of the units for sale at around 125 US dollars.
However, the Godson-2 CPU included in the PCs has come under scrutiny of late. BLX IC Design Corp., producer of the Godson-2, produced its first working prototype in 2005. The chip clocked at 500Mhz, and BLX at the time claimed the Godson's performance rivaled that of higher-clocked Pentium III CPUs. However, the chip's architecture has gotten attention around the industry for its similarities to the MIPS chip from MIPS Technologies Inc. According to market research group In-Stat, the Godson-2 is about 95 percent compatible with the MIPS R10000, which was introduced in 1995.'"
MIPS patents? (Score:5, Interesting)
Plasma [opencores.org] implements the MIPS architecture minuses the patented parts. Could the Godson CPU be a variant of this?
American retailers not much more (Score:4, Interesting)
Cheap computers for all (Score:2, Interesting)
We've all known MIT has been working on the $100 laptop project for some time. http://laptop.media.mit.edu/ [mit.edu]
A 500Mhx chip, etc... It might be inadequate for most programs that arent specifically made to work with it, but for a little more you'd think they could add some of those basic features to it and still undercut a $150 pricetag.
Re:MIPS patents? (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing is certain. Microsoft can't pretend that these Linux computers are going to end up running Windows.
Re:What about the $100 laptop? (Score:2, Interesting)
It was that building a computer for relatively cheap (that still functions) is quite possible. I'm not very surprised that china can build $150 laptops... and the government will still make a healthy profit on it probably.
Why is the processor seen as a ripped-off design? (Score:4, Interesting)
The principal investigator of the Godson program, Hu Weiwu, have some colorful comparions [eetimes.com] to houses and bedrooms when he tries to explain why he means that the Godson-2 processor does not infringe on any patents or intellectual properties.
Re:MIPS patents? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, I remember Windows NT for MIPS. That hardly means that you can buy such a beast today. Even if you could buy NT for MIPs what are the chances of it running on something that is 95% compatible?
Besides, what sort of freakshow would rather run Windows NT 3.51 on MIPs over Linux? The most sophisticated piece of software that is likely to run on such a system is notepad.exe.
Re:Why is this so hard? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, they ran Netscape 3.0 and Windows 95 just fine. Similar software today, however, is much better than it used-to be, which is why almost nobody uses that old software on their new computers.
Though, you aren't extremely far off. Something like a 400MHz P2 is fast enough for things like DVD playback, and most office apps if you don't mind a bit of waiting.
There becomes a point when making a slower CPU, and a smaller (capacity) hard drive, just isn't any cheaper.
Maxtor tries to get around that by making their cheapest, 10-20GB 5400 rpm hard drives only half the height of normal 3.5" drives.
Now that's only NEW units. You can get some old surplus units pretty cheap, because they'll sell them at a loss to get them out of their wherehouse, but that's a limited supply, that's gone when it's gone.
With that said, for reasonably small quantities, you can put together many systems if you're willing to wait for surplus components to drop in price, but it wouldn't make much of a business. Someone ordering 500 systems wants to know what the clock speed of the CPU is, the type of motherboard, the brand and size of hard drive. You can't just say "You'll get whatever's available at the time". For larger companies, the added maintenance costs of systems with various parts outweighs that inital savings.
For individuals, though, it's pretty easy to piece together a multi-GHz system for a little over $100 (provided assembly time is free).
Re:So what are we upset about? (Score:1, Interesting)
This shows, yet again, that IP and monopolies are bad. Also it is an example of why china should choose to stay outside of international IT agreements, so that their companies are not affected by american patents. (btw. why would they be, even in europe it is required that you have european patents, us patents are not valid).
Is this MIPS architectyre really patented in china?
I have a feeling they will anyway (Score:3, Interesting)
The BSA is paid to cry wolf. That's what it does for a living. It's there just to paint a bleak image where poor starving software developpers like MS or Oracle or Autodesk are losing trillions to piracy. It's there to take every single 3D Studio Max copy that some chinese kid downloaded to model a ship or skin for free mod for a $30 game, and present it as $6000 stolen from the poor starving software developpers. As a copy that would 100% surely be bought if that kid couldn't pirate it. (Never mind that that's 6 years' average salary down there, and frankly noone pays _that_ kind of money just to make a free mod.)
But even that kind of crying wolf has at least _some_ minimum touch with reality. After all, a copy pirated _is_ a copy pirated. So at some point the BSA figured out they can do better than that. Nowadays what they do is count the PCs sold and apply some bogus "for every X PCs, a copy of program Y should have been sold." E.g., for each PC, an OS should have been sold. For, say, every other PC, a copy of MS office should have been sold. Etc. Anything that ends up under their expected numbers, is taken 1-to-1 to mean money lost to piracy.
So, yeah, I wouldn't be too surprised if these PCs end up counted like that too: What, 1 million MIPS PCs sold and no MIPS OS sold? Damn pirates! That's 1 million copies of IRIX and NT 3.5 for MIPS that are pirated down there! That's billions of dollars lost by the industry and hundreds of thousands of jobs lost! Oh the humanity! Someone do something! Quick, the government do something against it!