Taiwan's Via Technologies plans to promote PCs that will sell for close to $250 this fall in an attempt to gain ground in the consumer market.
The Terra PC is a reference design created by Via that will be licensed to PC makers around the world. The company will show off prototypes at the Computex trade show in Taipei next month, and systems are likely to hit the shelves in different markets worldwide by September or October, said Ravi Pradhan, Via's manager for India.
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The proposed price for the Terra, which includes a monitor, is achieved by picking components with cost in mind. The system, for instance, will run an older 1GHz processor from Via, Pradhan said. It will also come with 128MB of memory, about one-quarter the amount found on typical desktops these days, and a small drive.
Via is also tinkering with the idea of selling a PC that uses the TV as a monitor, but this concept has been a tough sell in the past. The chipmaker, while primarily known for chipsets, has a small sliver of the x86 processor market.
PCs for price points in the $200 to $300 range are rare but have been popping up recently. Xenitis, a manufacturer in India, sells a PC with a configuration similar to Terra for about $238 (9,990 rupees), with a monitor.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Wal-Mart offers a Linux desktop with an Advanced Micro Devices' Sempron processor and 128MB of memory for $199 and an Intel/Windows machine for $320. Neither, however, includes a monitor, one of the more expensive components in a cheap PC.
According to AMD CEO Hector Ruiz, manufacturers will produce $100 laptops within three years.
To cut support costs for the Terra PC, Via puts the operating system and the applications on a read-only flash memory chip, rather than on the hard drive. Ideally, this will cut down on viruses and other problems, although it makes updates a little more difficult. The hard drive primarily exists to store additional programs, music and photographs.
"The idea is to get as close to the perfect as possible," Pradhan said. "There is no way I am going to take care of all of the problems."
The Terra will run Linux, although conceivably it could also be bundled with older versions of Microsoft's software that have been bug-tested for years.
Price declines are a staple of the PC industry. Compaq Computer gained ground in the consumer market in 1997 when it released the first mainstream desktop for under $1,000. A few years later, some companies offered "free" PCs to customers who signed up for three-year Internet service contracts. Most of those companies went under.
AMD came out with a device called the Personal Internet Communicator last fall in India. It is similar to a computer but comes with the Windows CE operating system. It hasn't made much of a dent. For instance, M.K. Shankaralinge Gowda, the secretary of the department of information technology in the state of Karnataka--he's the highest ranking IT official in the state where the high-tech city of Bangalore is located--had not heard of it.
These types of computer will be aimed at those not on the bleeding edge of technology. A simple subscription service that offers a CD each month/quarter which is then loaded into ROM would do the job very nicely.
This pc will never make it. People don't want to throw $200 down the toilet...Better to spend a little more and get something that actually works and runs programs.
...who don't play heavy games and such. Putting the OS on a ROM chip will make it more secure (viruses can't write to the chip so they can't integrate with or corrupt the OS)and will make many operations much faster because ROM access is much faster than hard drive access. Many people these days use their PC primarily for an email/internet client and you don't need massive power for that.
Via is trying to trumpet a forthcoming 1GHz PC. Of course, Wal Mart already sells PCs with Sempron 2200+ processors for $50 less and they are available now. Via is trying to make headlines for a project that won't get off the ground. No one is going to buy a PC with a 1GHz Via processor over one with a Sempron 2200+ from AMD - and by the time the Via gets out, the processor speed on the AMD box will likely have increased.
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The amount of patches required to keep these systems secure is going to quickly swallow up any remaining disk space!
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Wal Mart already sells PCs with Sempron 2200+ processors
for $50 less and they are available now. Via is trying to
make headlines for a project that won't get off the ground.
No one is going to buy a PC with a 1GHz Via processor over
one with a Sempron 2200+ from AMD - and by the time
the Via gets out, the processor speed on the AMD box will
likely have increased.