Community Matters

Lots of new ultralight notebooks are being announced these days – I’m already at a loss trying to keep track of all the little machines entering the market (or at least being announced – very few seem to actually be shipping). But I’ll admit that this one sparked my interest: the 3K Longitude 400 uses (and I quote) a “Low Power Consumption Ingenic 400MHz 32-Bit Single Core CPU”.

What’s most interesting about this (besides the fact that Ingenic seems to be the International Group for Genetic Improvement of Cocoa – but a little more googling gets you to Ingenic Semiconductor) is that this appears to be the first laptop design based on this CPU. The information on Ingenic’s site is rather sparse. It appears that the CPU was originally only designed to run at up to 360MHz, that it’s based on a 180nm process (the Intel Atom processor, for comparison, is built on a 45nm process) and (based on the data sheet claim of <0.5mW/MHz) it should consume only about 0.2W. It’s a MIPS derivative which means it doesn’t run x86 software like more or less every other laptop out there, which will make comparing the 3K Longitude 400 to other contenders pretty hard; I’ll try to find some benchmarks but am not optimistic.

Everything else seems fairly low-end / standard: 512MB of RAM, 4GB of flash, 7″ 800×480 display (bad), 3 USB ports, wired and wireless Ethernet, Linux pre-installed, estimated price of USD 400. Given all that, I cannot see why someone would prefer this over the original (i.e., the EeePC 701).