Register Hardware

Original URL: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/09/14/china_sub_100_quid_pc/

China's sub-£100 PC launches

By Andrew Orlowski (andrew.orlowski@theregister.co.uk)
Published Thursday 14th September 2006 15:21 GMT

A Chinese PC vendor has begun shipping a box with its homegrown Godson CPU, with a price tag of between $175 to $200. Thanks to current exchange rates, that's under £100. Eventually, though, OEM ZhongKe Menglan Electronics expects to sell the unit for $125.

Processing is powered by the Godson-2 chip, also known as Longxhin, a co-production between the Beijing Longxin IC Design Company (BLX) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. ZME's Godson-2 runs at 800Mhz to 1GHz, according to the EE Times, includes 256MB of DDR memory, and a 40 to 60GB hard disk. Not a specification to worry Dell, but plenty enough horsepower to run Linux.

It's the rapid pace (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/25/china_cpu/) of China's technological progress that most impresses outsiders, however.

Today the Chinese Academy of Sciences gave details of the latest Godsin/Longxin, which the Academy claims is comparable to an Intel Pentium 4. Depending on whether you prefer the Academy's naming convention or BLX's, the new chip is called the Godson-2E, or the Longxin IIE. It boasts 47m transistors, has a clock speed of 1GHz, and mass production is expected towards the end of this year.

The academy says it's working on 8 to 16-core versions too, to debut in the Godson-3.

Observers in the past have described Godsin as a MIPS derivative.

The CAS denies that Godson/Longxhin owes MIPS any IP royalties, arguing that it conducted due diligence to avoid infringing MIPS patents.

The sub-£100 PC represents an important milestone in more than one respect. It not only prices a PC as low as a PDA, but lower than the lowest retail price of a copy of Microsoft Windows. ®