'Jisus' Eee-alike sub-notebook to use Chinese Atom-smasher

Haven't we seen this one before

Some of us still remember the first superscalar x86 CPU to hit the market. It was not Athlon - it was U5 by UMC. It was co-processorless CPU which could run circles around 486SXs of various kinds and on integer math. In fact its integer performance was on par with 486DX2 at 66 while costing a fraction of the price and using a fraction of the power. According to UMC there were E-series of CPUs with FPU and 66+ double the frequency models in the pipeline.

We all know what happened next. Intel sued them into the ground and made sure that the performance of its lousy silicon is not challenged by anything revolutionary for the next 3+ years. Interestingly enough, the first challenger to successfully claim the performance crown in the are used a very simiilar design - it was AMD Athlon nearly 5+ years later on.

We all know what will happen next this time. After all this is what patents are for. History keeps repeating itself.

Me coat, with the U5 Green logo on the back.

I'm interested

Larger screen and faster chip for about the same price as the 4G Eee...

By the way, the sales link doesn't work - try here:

http://vanderled.com/uk.php?p=news&id=8

Pointless

i was getting interested, until the fateful specification "800 x 480" came in to view. It's the only think stopping me from being interested in any of the current crop of UMPCs. Maybe the HP will do...

What would Jisus do?

What on earth possessed them to call it Jisus?

Re: a title is required

"steep for a cheap chinese laptop with unknown processor!"

Uh, of course you know that most laptops really come from China, no matter what brand it says on the top. Buying explicitly Chinese just cuts out the middleman.

I wonder if I can order one of those in Finland. The site seems inaccessible right now..

Pointless at 480 vertical pixels

Wake me when they ship at least 600 vertical pixels and preferably 1024x768. Until then, it's a glorified PDA, especially if it ever needs to run Windows.

Jisus pronunciation

Surely it is pronounced "Aesus" or just "asus" 8-0

Jiz'us

The dutch making pr0n more protable

Eee PC Girl

Why, may I ask, is there no photo in this article which clearly relates to the Eee PC??

Longsoon is MIPS, not x86

As an ex-MIPS engineer, I agree with Warhelmet: the Longsoon chips are MIPS clones, and not x86 compatible. And they're now legal, since they've bought a MIPS licence.

@Neil Hoskins

The N810 does run Linux, and does have a (small) keyboard. Not really in the same category as the Psion 7 and Netbook though, I suppose.

@Matt Bridge-Wilkinson

Matt, you might not "get it" but hundreds of thousands of other people do (including me 8-) and have bought the mini eeePC.

I don't want to lug a big laptop around and the "proper" £299 laptops are all 15.4" huge beasts ... those are for workie people not the general populous who don't want to look like dorks dragging the big beasts of burden with them.

The eeePC (of which this looks a carbon copy clone (tm)) will fit in a {hand,man}bag with no probs and when combined with a Three USB wireless modem works brilliantly as a mobile device ... with a full copy of OpenOffice, Skype, email, OpenSSH, VNC, VLC/mplayer ... you name it. Skype video calling over Three works great, MP4/MP2/etc video playback is excellent. The OS is not "odd" but it does not suffer from the 1,000,000 viruses for Windows 8-)

I think a 9" (something x 800) screen and built in HSPDA wireless modem would make it better. For a high-end version add a swivel and touch pad to the screen and you have a very useful tablet.

The key points to this "ultra-mobile" section of the PC market is SIZE and PRICE.

For those who miss the advert for Eee...

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/entertainment/2008-03/21/content_6555901.htm

Here's something rather similar !! Enjoy !!

@Ralph B

Judging by the thigh size of the eeepc girly, Jessica Alba would be to skinny to appeal to the market of would be miny laptop owners.

My choice would be a more voluptuous celeb such as JL-H

http://www.theliberalblogger.com/231/jennifer-love-hewitt-fat-beach-pictures/

@Alan Donaly

It's a much argued point but RISC processors are generally considered to be better suited in compact and embedded systems. Lower power consumption and smaller for the same kind of performance and adding extra peripherals and functions is also simpler for manufacturers than with the quite strict x86 configuration.

The Motorola processor in pre-intel mac's was a RISC (when they really where better suited to multimedia than PC's), as is the core used in the playstation3 and IBM's servers, add SUN systems to that list too etc etc.

That's the trouble, right there. Which one of these systems runs windows? None. The only version of windows that runs on architectures other than x86 is CE, kind of limited choice there. This has fixed the majority of PC hardware development on the x86 path and while x86 is very well suited to a general range of tasks it doesn't allow much room to build hardware with defined requirements or for choosing the path of least resistance in development. As I mentioned above, Motorola mac's really where better suited to multimedia than PC's, as where Amiga systems.

If the cheap, compact laptop market does grow as much as eee sales suggest then we could soon see IBM's core processor being used in ultra-compacts and heavy development of RISC cores from competitors.

It would also leave room for more task specific systems, mac already knows the multimedia business and the BSD base they use runs just fine on existing RISC systems with unusual hardware. But if they can take off in the consumer market then MS will be playing catch-up and will be facing the kind of driver nightmares open-source developers have been dealing with for years as they try and cover a much wider range of hardware and communications layers. Personally I don't think it would be possible for them to compete using a closed source OS, there are too many kernel specific issues for them to addapt to every kind of hardware.

That would put computing back into the kind of situation that existed up to the early 90's with a range hardware and operating systems on offer. A good thing from my point of view but it would make choosing and upgrading systems more complicated.

cheers

Screen Size.

The screen format is wide-screen, slightly taller than 16:9 ratio, which would give a larger possible text size with fewer lines.

Porting Linux software to MIPS might be a bit of a barrier, there's a big x86 bias, but if the Eee can sell, so can this. How many people are going to care what's in the box, as long as they can write letters, browse the web, watch a DivX movie, and add naughty speech bubbles to the pjotographs on their cellphone?

Why choose

A MIPS CPU is a lot simpler than an x86, which means less transistors in the CPU's heart. But almost all the transistors on a CPU chip are cache and interface anyway, so it won't ever make up for the huge economies of scale in the x86 clone market. But while you can't buy a chinese x86 yet (for legal and political reasons, you can get the chinese MIPS.

It will never run Vista, so you won't even be tempted. That's got to be a plus, too...

Why choose

A MIPS instruction set (RISC) CPU is a lot simpler than an x86, which means less transistors in the CPU's heart. But almost all the transistors on a CPU chip are cache and interface anyway, so it won't ever make up for the huge economies of scale in the x86 clone market. But while you can't buy a chinese x86 yet (for legal and political reasons, you can get the chinese RISC.

It will never run Vista, so you won't even be tempted. That's got to be a plus, too...

No porting involved

Unbelievable as it may sound, there is *no* "porting" of software involved. Just cross-compile the software for MIPS architecture instead of i686, and it will work. Once you have a kernel, compiler and toolchain ready to run on the target architecture,

I'm surprised they went with MIPS, though ..... ARM patents will begin expiring soon.

DEC Alpha

Windows NT ran on x86 and the DEC Alpha 64 bit RISC chip. I never saw one though and few Windows apps were cross-compiled for it.