"SceneCON is an annual meeting of underground computer artists who are members of the famous demo scene. With SceneCON, the organizers aim to follow the two decade old tradition of demo scene parties in Hungary. Yet, with a bit of a twist. This years party was held from the 16th until the 17th of June, 2007. Among its highlights was an extensive demonstration of bplan's EFIKA miniature mainboard running various flavours of Linux as well as a work-in-progress version of MorphOS 2.0. Luckily, the presentation was captured on video. The entire presentation has a total length of nearly an hour with MorphOS 2.0 being featured in the last 14 minutes of it."
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Member since:2006-03-17
Just one little remark: five years ago nobody could produce a system with this performance, and just 4 watts of power usage, or 10 watts when built as a complete machine with HDD and video card. And I'm still not aware of any other machine providing this flexibility and processing power, while consuming less (or even just a little bit more).
Member since:2005-12-31
Yes, the Efika is very basic. And I'd guess their goal was to make the smallest sized desktop computer out there with low cost & power usage.
Most people can do without some of the stuff you mention.
GB networking isn't really a big issue for most.
AGP will work pretty good ( doubt there'll be any really intense 3D games played on the Efika to require PCIe )
SATA won't make a big performance difference.
USB 2.0 would be nice to have though.
It would be great to have the above features to make it more modern but most aren't too important or essential.
The real issues are the 128MB Memory & 400Mhz processor & NO onboard video. Try running Linux with this low end system & Gnome/KDE & you'll see how it slows to a crawl.
MorphOS will probably run well but any Linux/Unix OS will have to be stripped down ( bare minimum ) to run well.
It *needed* to have 256MB Memory, 800Mhz processor & decent onboard video card.
Below are the specs for the Efika system:
http://www.pegasosppc.com/efika.php
The funny thing is that their *old* discontinued Pegasus board looks better to me ( allowed more RAM & faster CPUs ):
http://www.genesippc.com/pegasos.php
Edited 2007-07-16 16:53
Member since:2005-07-23
Old pegasos was overkill and more expensive, and since the intrest for these machines and oses aren't that huge I guess a small cheap board for people who wanna try morphos is a much better choice than expensive highend machines which noone buys.
The efika motherboard, cpu and memory is 75 euro, how can anyone complain? It's not more than a decent mouse damnit ;D
Member since:2006-11-02
Most people can do without some of the stuff you mention.
GB networking isn't really a big issue for most.
AGP will work pretty good ( doubt there'll be any really intense 3D games played on the Efika to require PCIe )
SATA won't make a big performance difference.
USB 2.0 would be nice to have though.
I agree on the GB networking. But AGP is dying out, with more and more PCs having PCIe only, it's only a matter of time before no AGP cards can be found anymore. Same for non-SATA IDE drives, although that'll take some more time.
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Member since:
2006-11-02
I really can't get that worked up about the Efika. It has no SATA, no USB 2.0, no GB networking, no PCIe. Basically it's all > 5 year old stuff, and they're acting like it's the next best thing.