Firm puts AMD chip in cheapo Chinese PC

The firm, a spin off from the government-funded Peking University, showed off a prototype of a UMPC motherboard running Windows XP. It said a finished product would be ready in about a year.

AMD licensed the low-power x86 microprocessor design to the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology and Peking University in 2005. The University is seeking to market its resultant Unity-863 system-on-a-chip PC design.

"We will be able to make contributions to narrow the digital divide in China and even in other developing countries," Cheng Xu, a microelectronics professor at Peking University, told the China Daily, hopefully.

Many of the current generation of UMPCs are made in Chinese factories, but few are designed by Chinese companies. µ