Re: VIA P3 1ghz based laptop

In article news:<45ffb008$1_3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Me here wrote:
Has anyone had any experience with VIA cPU based laptops?

A friend rang asking how they perform compared to say a 1.3 ghz celeron
M, and as I've no experience with recent VIA stuff, I couldn't oblige.

I have a /desktop/ PC with a VIA CPU. No experience with VIA in a laptop.

The VIA CPUs have very low energy requirements and so should suit mobile
applications quite well, but are not the fastest things in the world. Most
have only 64k of level 2 cache and can use only a single-channel memory bus
which -- taken together -- does make them relatively slow for very
memory-intensive applications. Whether they're fast /enough/ depends what
you want to do. My 1GHz VIA C3 runs a linux desktop and drives a freeview
TV card acceptable well. It's fast enough for most normal desktop
operations, but it takes an absolute age to rebuild the system (this is
Gentoo linux, so everything is compiled from source).

VIA used to be bad news.

There were some VIA support chipsets for intel and AMD processors that were
a bit disappointing. Their newer stuff is fine and their CPUs are brilliant
if you want low power consumption - the VIA CPU business has its roots in
Cyrix, whose CPUs used to be as respected as AMD's as alternatives to
intel.

Apparently the latest VIA stuff is much improved to the point that I
believe I read that Bill Gates is using it as the basis for the world
$100 tablet PC (the lime green crank the handle thing) for
under-developed countries.

That's the "One Laptop Per Child" project ... NOT run by Bill Gates
(indeed, free software is very important to the project, and it will
probably end up running some form of linux).

See http://www.laptop.org

The friends model in question is a MercuryIT G320 which is sold in
Australia, India and I think possibly UK.

I imagine it should drive a DVD player and run XP based applications
quite OK for the sort of stuff most baseline users do.

That machine is apparently sold with XP and has a DVD drive, so I imagine
it can do all the basic stuff without any trouble, yes.

Cheers,
Daniel.


.

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