Picking the perfect PC for your pocket

The Inquirer posted a comparison of the OLPC and other products it deemed potential competition for Negroponte's subnote. Its review of the Asus Eee -

Asus Eee
At last month's Computex show in Taipei, Asus showed the first consumer product based around the Classmate: its Eee range. The Eee PC resembles a better-specified but less ruggedized Classmate: 512MB RAM, 2-16GB of Flash storage, Ethernet and modem and Wifi. It even has a webcam. The model 701 has a 7" 800x480 screen, and will be followed in 2008 by the 1001 with a 10" 1024x600 or 1280x768 screen. The real draw to the Eee is the anticipated price, though: $200 for the 701 and $300 for the 1001. It's lighter than its rivals at 0.89kg, but that may be because of a small battery - its life is estimated at only three hours.

Part of the special appeal of the Eee is its operating system. It's a special cut-down version of Xandros Linux which can operate in two modes - a simplified beginners' mode and a more normal Windows-like desktop which from the pictures looks like KDE. The benefits of Linux on such a PC are twofold: firstly, done right, it can be fast, capable and responsive even on such a low spec, and secondly, unlike something obscure like EPOC, with Linux you can add extra applications readily, and you get luxuries like Flash and Java and media playback and so on.

So we have two different families of small, relatively lightweight sub-sub-notebooks: one that's really underpowered but has a radical screen and other cool stuff, and Intel's nearly-a-gigahertz offering. But that's a 900MHz chip with no secondary cache, to keep the power and heat down. Those of you who remember the horror of the original Celeron, a cut-down cacheless 300MHz Pentium II, will recall that that having no secondary cache is a Very Bad Thing. The Celeron 300 was hastily withdrawn and replaced with the Celeron 300A with a fairly poxy 128kb of on-chip cache, but even thus handicapped, it was twice as fast. (If you ran it on a 100MHz front-side bus instead of its slothful 66MHz, it became a 450MHz chip and was actually very nippy for the money. With minor hacks you could run two of them in SMP - serious power for under £200.) Since then, though, I've always avoided Celerons and Durons. Sure, they're cheap, but the small L2 cache cripples performance. They're all right in something like a NAS device, but in a PC, I'd rather have last year's model of the fully-equipped version, which usually costs about the same.

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Note the phrase "But that's a 900MHz chip with no secondary cache" that I highlighted in the last paragraph. Assuming the article is referring to the Pentium M 900 Mhz, it is listed on Intel's offical page for Pentium Ms as having a 1MB L2 cache. It would be interesting to find out where the guy got his info as even the McCaslin A100/A110 processors have 512K caches.