Via's Nano Plans: Too Little, Too Late?
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 13th Jan 2009 17:55 UTC
Hardware, Embedded Systems At the end of 2008, the OSNews team made a short list of the tech-related things they would like to see in 2009. On my list was the hope that we'd see more competition in the netbook market, which is now dominated by Intel's Atom platform, resulting in manufacturers all releasing essentially the same machine, but with a different badge and case colour. Where are Intel's competitors? We know AMD is on its way, we know that the Chinese are producing some noteworthy chips, and that the ARM chip is jumping up and down screaming for attention - but where is Via's Nano platform? Shouldn't it be here already?
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Interesting year for netbooks
by DRIQ on Tue 13th Jan 2009 18:24 UTC
DRIQ
Member since:
2008-04-28

This year will be very interesting for the netbook markets.

The Chinese has released their Loongson/Godson netbook on the 8 Jan 09. I am not sure if their chip runs x86 code or not. If they sell a few million of the Linux version, will Microsoft produce a non-x86 Windows for them?

I know the Chinese can make the netbooks cheap, even the Shaolin temple in South Africa can afford it.

Reply Score: 1

rjamorim Member since:
2005-12-05

The Chinese has released their Loongson/Godson netbook on the 8 Jan 09. I am not sure if their chip runs x86 code or not.


The Loongson runs the MIPS architecture natively, but the Loongson 3 adds new instructions that accelerate x86 instruction translation.

Reply Parent Score: 2

lemur2 Member since:
2007-02-17

This year will be very interesting for the netbook markets.

The Chinese has released their Loongson/Godson netbook on the 8 Jan 09. I am not sure if their chip runs x86 code or not.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson#History

Loongson is a MIPS architecture chip.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson#Operating_Systems

Linux distributions that work on Loongson:

* Debian Linux, specifically their mipsel port
* Gentoo Linux, work in progress
* Slackware Linux is also being ported, although nothing has been released yet.
* Red Flag Linux
* Mandriva, since September 2007


Apparently, "users have managed to port other operating systems such as Windows CE to the Loongson architecture". The article doesn't say how the said users got hold of a MIPS architecture version of Windows CE.

Reply Parent Score: 1

poundsmack Member since:
2005-07-13

Loongson 3 will be a MIPS/x86 hybrid chip.

"The 65nm Loongson 3 (Godson-3) is planned to run at a clock speed between 1 to 1.2 GHz, with 4 cores first (10W) and 8 cores later (20W), and it is expected by 2010[3]. It adds 200+ new instructions to speed up x86 instruction translation and run Windows [4]. The first version of the chip will only support DDR2 DRAM, will not have SMT support or a built-in network interface."

Reply Parent Score: 2

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