[IAEP] information - 65 uk pounds (90 euros) laptop report

[Jim Gettys]

Heh.  A 400mhz mips can do just fine, thank you very much.  200mhz
strong arms are also useful.

A much bigger question that has a strong influence on utility is whether
the chip has an FPU - free software depends on that for most of the
codecs and other code on a laptop, as people got sloppy once x86's had
FPU's and it is pretty scattered through lots of libraries and
applications).  

It is also one of the major reasons why we chose the Geode: at the time
we did, there were no other low cost chips which had FPU's; that
situation is certainly changing.
                      - Jim


On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 18:39 +0100, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 12:34 PM, Christoph Derndorfer
> <e0425826 at student.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
> > Sameer Verma schrieb:
> >> alan c wrote:
> >>> extract:
> >>> Taiwanese vendor Carapelli has taken the wraps off what it claims is
> >>> the world's cheapest laptop, coming in at just £65.
> >>>
> >>> The Impulse NPX-9000, which has a seven inch screen, is light on
> >>> specifications with a 400MHz processor,
> >>
> >> Its a 400 MHz MIPS processor, not an x86. I have a 450MHz MIPS that runs
> >> reasonably well as a server (Cobalt Qube 2) with 128MB RAM. See
> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_architecture for MIPS processors.
> >> Incidentally, support for Cobalt Qube 2 ran out years ago, so I run
> >> Debian on it.
> >
> > As I've previously said elsewhere:
> >
> > You're not going to have too much fun with that 400 MHz MIPS processor.
> > Even if the Linux distro running on this machine (did anyone see which
> > one it is?) is heavily optimized the system is going to pretty damn slow
> > compared to the Geode LX700 in the XO or other low-cost x86 laptops when
> > it comes to overall system performance.
> 
> We still can improve performance a *lot*. Are we really doing anything
> that isn't possible to do on such a slow processor? All that
> performance work would benefit the faster platforms as well.
> 
> If someone was interested in improving cairo, X, gtk, python, etc
> performance on such platforms, everybody would win.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Tomeu
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-- 
Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child