Chinese company produces US$150 Linux PC

Hmm, interesting. I suppose this is indeed the Chinese answer to the $100 laptop. And the wild part is that hardware is not half bad for the expected specs!

A Chinese company called YellowSheepRiver wants to make affordable budget computing a reality with its new US$150 Linux Municator, a highly compact and innovative PC built with inexpensive Chinese hardware components. Although MIT’s much touted US$100 Linux laptop has yet to transcend its status as vaporware, YellowSheepRiver already has a working product which could potentially be available for purchase within the next three months.

Urging potential customers to “Say no to Wintel,” YellowSheepRiver is devoted to using its own Linux distribution and hardware designed and manufactured by Chinese companies. YellowSheepRiver hopes to close the “digital divide” by making computer technology available to the Chinese public at an affordable price. The Municator, which comes with 256MB of RAM, uses a unique 64-bit CPU with an instruction set based on a subset of the MIPS architecture. Designed by a Chinese company called BLX, the the cheap chip is clocked at 400 or 600MHZ and supposedly provides performance comparable to that of an Intel P3. Unlike MIT’s laptop, the Municator is not designed to be a mobile computer. Rather than using an LCD display, it features support for S-video and VGA which will enable it to interface with televisions and monitors. For storage, the Municator comes with a 40 GB external USB drive and support for an optional external optical drive. With four USB 2.0 ports and built-in ethernet support, the Municator is quite capable of supporting other external devices and connecting to the Internet. According to the YellowSheepRiver web site, integrated WiFi and a lithium-ion battery pack are also available options…. Source: Ars

[tags]ram,laptop,chinese,lcd display,yellowsheepriver[/tags]