They probably won't be able to keep the price that low using an Atom. The ARM processor is by far the most widely deployed processor (10 billion so far, 5 billion per year estimated by 2011). Licensing costs and royalties are much lower for the ARM than the Atom. The other nice thing about the ARM is the power consumption is low enough to give 10hr+ battery life. Not only that they run Linux but not Windows (except Windows CE which has some ARM support).
FWIWARM originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine and was originally developed by Acorn Computer in England back in the early 1980s based on work done at USC Berkley. ARM Holdings is strictly a design shop and produces none of their own chips but widely licenses the cores to many other manufacturers who may add optional subsystems. More than 90% of all Cell phones contain at least 1 ARM core. The reason they are so energy efficient is that they contain less than 40,000 transistors as compared with current CISC chips which can have upwards of 40 million transistors, and they can still keep up pretty well.
Mike Tom Brown wrote:
I'm hoping the E790 model sells well and the manufacturer tries a 10" screen, 90+% keyboard and Atom processor, at a low price point. Unless Debian supports both the ARM processor and LTSP (no evidence of that yet), or the manufacturer uses the Atom, we'll be out of luck.http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/ http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=ltsp Tom Mike Cook wrote:That particular unit uses a 533MHz, ARM9 based, Samsung S3C2450, RISC processor. I'm not sure how well it would be supported in LTSP, definitely not a standard kernel. It comes with WindowsCE and they say it will run Android. Sounds like it could be cool though if you ditch the WinCE which isn't fully ARM compatible. As far as I can tell there are no US suppliers for any MenQ products and it looks like MenQ is selling to oem's, not consumers, so the $80 price might be an oem price rather than a consumer price. The 7" screen might be a problem for us blind-as-a-bat types too. There are a number of inexpensive ARM based netbooks either planned or in pre-production now and they promise adequate performance , long battery life, and excellent Linux compatibility. Not a gaming or compiling environment but good for general purpose web surfing and word processing. Hopefully some of these systems might someday become available in the US.Mike Tom Brown wrote:EasyPC E790, $80 (yes, eighty USD)http://www.techgadgets.in/misc-gadgets/2009/16/menq-presents-easypc-e790-mini-pc/ Tom ** This list is PUBLICLY archived. **PLEASE don't post personal or sensitive information unless you wish for it to be in the public domain.To visit the main website for Free Geek Michiana go to http://www.freegeekmichiana.orgTo post to the list send email to frgeek-michiana@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxThe archive is available at //www.freelists.org/archives/frgeek-michiana/You may unsubscribe or change your list settings by going to the list website at //www.freelists.org/webpage/frgeek-michiana** This list is PUBLICLY archived. **PLEASE don't post personal or sensitive information unless you wish for it to be in the public domain.To visit the main website for Free Geek Michiana go to http://www.freegeekmichiana.orgTo post to the list send email to frgeek-michiana@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxThe archive is available at //www.freelists.org/archives/frgeek-michiana/You may unsubscribe or change your list settings by going to the list website at //www.freelists.org/webpage/frgeek-michiana** This list is PUBLICLY archived. **PLEASE don't post personal or sensitive information unless you wish for it to be in the public domain.To visit the main website for Free Geek Michiana go to http://www.freegeekmichiana.orgTo post to the list send email to frgeek-michiana@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxThe archive is available at //www.freelists.org/archives/frgeek-michiana/You may unsubscribe or change your list settings by going to the list website at //www.freelists.org/webpage/frgeek-michiana
** This list is PUBLICLY archived. ** PLEASE don't post personal or sensitive information unless you wish for it to be in the public domain. To visit the main website for Free Geek Michiana go to http://www.freegeekmichiana.org To post to the list send email to frgeek-michiana@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx The archive is available at //www.freelists.org/archives/frgeek-michiana/ You may unsubscribe or change your list settings by going to the list website at //www.freelists.org/webpage/frgeek-michiana
