News - ASUS trots out AMD Geode-powered Eee PC netbook

[HEXUS]

Now there's a blast from the past.

Read more.

[scaryjim]

I'll buy it if it's less than £150. Though with the rest of the spec that seems unlikely...

Gotta be a mistimed April Fool, surely?


EDIT: the spec sheets have just been pulled from the ASUS website by the look of it, but they seemed to be suggesting a 2hr battery life from a 6-cell battery. Got to be a mistake, surely...?

FURTHER EDIT: you can still find the 1201K by searching the asus website, but the through links take you to a path-error page...

FINAL EDIT? It appears the details are back up - so not a mistake or a joke, but I'm still struggling to see the point...

[kingpotnoodle]

The Geode NX1750 was a cheekily re-branded ULV version of the Athlon XP-M.

I can't imagine that it'd outperform Atom (given that Athlon 64 at a similar clock speed is barely ahead) and had a TDP of 25W... that'd explain the 2 hour battery.

I think this has to be some sort of mistake by Asus, nobody would buy that!

[amdavies]

ASUS actually had a EEE PC running Snapdragon that was pulled very quickly after being demoed.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/01/v...pdragon-oh-my/

The only thing I can think of, now that they're supposedly thinking about an AMD version, that would stop them producing the above is the lack of suitable OS. There are plenty of choices for ARM but none of them would really be consumer friendly right now so they may be waiting for Android to be suitable enough for netbooks and tablets.

[aidanjt]

You know Linux has been running on ARM for a long long time, right?

[kingpotnoodle]

ASUS actually had a EEE PC running Snapdragon that was pulled very quickly after being demoed.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/01/v...pdragon-oh-my/

The only thing I can think of, now that they're supposedly thinking about an AMD version, that would stop them producing the above is the lack of suitable OS. There are plenty of choices for ARM but none of them would really be consumer friendly right now so they may be waiting for Android to be suitable enough for netbooks and tablets.

Ubuntu has an ARM port, and there is a new version of Win CE as demoed on the Asus Tablets recently... but that's a few months off.

[alpha channel]

when I read the headline I was thinking of the one engadget got a shot of at Computex (going by the Eee PC 1015T moniker) which is kitted out with the same CPU but packs in 1GB or 2GB of DDR3, a 250GB or 320GB HD and packing a 4200 series IGP.

[scaryjim]

... The only thing I can think of, now that they're supposedly thinking about an AMD version, that would stop them producing the above is the lack of suitable OS. ...

erm, you do know that the Geode is an x86 processor derived directly from the Athlon-M XP, don't you? The specs even say it's shipping with Windows XP. That's not the point. The point is that the Geode is both slower, and more power hungry, than the most recent single-core AMD processors. It was potentially a good idea about 6 years ago, but it doesn't belong anywhere near a modern netbook.

I can only assume that a batch of motherboards and processor "fell off the back of a lorry" and into ASUS's factory, and they decided that they might as well use them rather than have to handle their disposal...?

[scaryjim]

when I read the headline I was thinking of the one engadget got a shot of at Computex (going by the Eee PC 1015T moniker) which is kitted out with the same CPU but packs in 1GB or 2GB of DDR3, a 250GB or 320GB HD and packing a 4200 series IGP.

Erm, that uses the V105 single core processor which is based (AFAIK) on Phenom II cores, but with a dedicated single core design. It is an eminently sensible choice for a modern netbook.

It has nothing at all to do with Geode NX, which (see above) is based on Athlon XP...

[amdavies]

While I'm well aware of the availability of Linux on ARM, you can add MeeGo in there as well, none of the current distributions are consumer ready. People aren't going to buy a device that takes them hours just to learn to use, they want results immediately.
Whatever your feelings on Apple, they know that the OS is just as, if not more, important than the hardware; the A4 in the iPad is an ARM-based chip. The iPad OS has been already been used by people on both the iPod Touch and the iPhone, so there's a lot of user-generated feedback already in place before the product was even launched.
Android, and possibly MeeGo, seem to be the main hopes for ARM-based processors for companies not named Apple. Linaro (an organization set up by the big names in ARM Linux) also seems to be headed in the right direction when it comes to making decisions.

For a long while ARM and it's partners have seemed to be happy making low powered processors for everything except fully fledged computers. I'm not sure if it was their own decision or if the threat by Intel to enter the mobile phone market prompted it but I'm glad to see ARM finally being pushed into the mainstream.

[scaryjim]

And again, that's very interesting, but I don't see what it has to do with a netbook running a low power x86 processor...

[this_is_gav]

People aren't going to buy a device that takes them hours just to learn to use, they want results immediately.

Eee PC?

[amdavies]

And again, that's very interesting, but I don't see what it has to do with a netbook running a low power x86 processor...

As I said, they've already produced an Eee PC running a non-Intel processor, so they do have a history of doing this. Their last attempt got pulled very shortly after it was demoed so I gave reasons why that might have been (leaving out my "Intel threatened them with a banhammer" conspiracy theory).
The whole ARM distributions list and reasoning behind their usage was in a response to a post up the page.

People aren't going to buy a device that takes them hours just to learn to use, they want results immediately.

Eee PC?

I'm referring to almost any device running a plain vanilla brand of Linux at this current time. Apple have transitioned people to running a unix-like OS through their introductions of the iPod Touch and the iPhone. Many people who've picked up an iPad state how impressed they were at being able to quickly start using it.
Most consumers are not going to want to sit down in front of a netbook (or tablet for that matter) and have to spend hours learning how to use it. Windows is the current answer to this but we now also have Chrome OS and Android being hyped by a company with clout and a vested interest in not having a MS or Apple OS on everything.

[scaryjim]

But again, that has nothing to do with the article because this netbook has an x86 processor and runs Windows XP. Nor does it explain why ASUS should choose the ancient Geode processor as opposed to the V105 (as used by the 1015 mentioned by alpha channel earlier). So you seem to be saying that your comment is relevant to the thread because you hijacked the thread!

For a touch device Android is actually very intuitive. Within a couple of minutes of picking up my HTC Magic I felt like I'd been using it for weeks, maybe months. But for a full netbook people expect a Windows experience, and while a lot of linux distributions come close, none of them is as easy to use as Windows. So if this thread were about a new ARM-based netbook, you'd have a great point...