According to the Lemote, 200 laptops with Loongson Inside will be produced before Spring Festival(Feb. 17, 2007). However, these laptops are not for sale but for test. About 100 of them will be owned by cooperative enterprises and the rest for Lemote staffs.
The design of Lemote Box is actually blueprint of Loongson laptops. They have almost same hardware installed(Lemote Box use laptop main memory and harddisks). The Box does not have a DVD drive, which is a difference.
To my astonishment, Loongson fans seem to be even more enthusiastic about laptops than Lemote boxes, despite a possible higher price.
6 comments:
Now I'm jealous! :-)
Looks like these laptop should have great battery life because of the low power consumption of Loongson.
They should make great machines for office work and most of the tasks except maybe high-end gaming.
Ah, they should have long battery life but they do not now.
I have posted a question about this issue on Lemote BBS. A staff told me achieving low power consumption in laptops involved many aspects, especially the whole design. Although they have such power-saving CPU, but they don't have a good general design. He said his laptop with loongson 2E could run about 3 hours only and some quarters more if just leave it idle.
Anyway, laptops with Loongson CPU have a bigger potential to get super-long battery life than x86 ones.
But the staff also mentioned that laptops with Loongson 2F inside will have a reasonable longer battery life. It is said L2F is more integrated and more compatible with other external parts.
Will a Loongson processor be placed inside a Lenovo laptop one day? Probably not since it seems like microprocessor manufacturing will move to carbon nanotubes instead of a silicone substrate. At least Godson is a "developed in China", "made in China" product.
I don't know when CPU will be in carbon nanotube era, but Loongson developers are always trying to catch up with advanced technology. Perhaps one day there may be a Carbon core Loongson.
Lenovo, along with other PC manufacturers won't choose Loongson until the CPU become competitive with Intel or AMD or VIA. Moreover, M$ Windows is not compatible with the CPU.
When you say competitive, you mean, in terms of speed? (mostly clock rate)
Looks to me a 1GHz PC is more than enough. My IBM/Lenovo laptop (with Linux) most of the times runs at 800MHz, and sometimes switches to 1.6GHz.
It looks to me for office work, Loongson should be OK. If it runs Java and C# (Mono), Firefox and a Flash player, it will be a great machine.
In terms of software, actually. Loongson is a Linux-only CPU, while Windows still dominates OS world. So we need to convince more people to Linux and develop more easy-to-use softwares.
I agree that A 1GHz PC is powerful enough for us to do office work. My L2E 666M already has acceptable speed. However, many common customers tend to choose faster CPU, bigger memory and harddisk than those they need when buying a PC. This is one point which PC manufacturers must consider.
It seems that your laptop behave much like mine, 800M when idle and 1.6G when doing CPU-intensive tasks.
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