China to produce $125 PC

A CHINESE outfit is hoping to release a PC which will hit the shops with a price tag of $125.

ZhongKe Menglan Electronics Technology is basing the PC around the locally designed Godson CPU. It only goes at 800MHz to 1GHz, but at that price you are not paying for performance. It will have 256MB of DDR DRAM, a 40 to 60GB hard drive and will run on Linux.

A government-backed BLX IC Design outfit created the Godson CPU. It claims it matches the performance of an Pentium 3. It didn't do very well and has also run into allegations of IP infringement. Apparently, MIPS Technologies say it is a close relative of its MIPS R10000, introduced in 1995. BLX denied this, but the chip is 95 per cent MIPS-compatible.

ZhongKe Menglan hopes that the latest version of the 64-bit chip, and the cut price PC will help Godson break into low-end PC platforms.

More at EE Times . µ