Mandriva leaps into the netbook market with the GDium
Lately it's hard to avoid the buzz about netbooks - the small, cheap laptop systems that were popularized by the Asus Eee PC (which, of course, Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring supports very well). Many in the community have asked if Mandriva is going to get directly involved in this market. Well, the answer is yes! Mandriva is providing the innovative operating system for the upcoming GDium netbook system, produced by Emtec.
The first GDium will be a netbook with a 10", 1024x600 resolution display and a battery life of four hours, weighing in at 1.1kg. The GDium itself is an interesting system: it uses the MIPS-derived Loongson CPU by ST Microelectronics, which helps to deliver the long battery life. Most interesting, though - especially for Mandriva! - is the way the operating system and data are stored. The GDium has no internal storage at all. The operating system and all user data are stored on a USB key, known as the G-Key, which plugs into a USB port under the keyboard, in the middle of the machine. This system lets you keep your system and data with you and use it on any GDium system, so it's ideal for any environment where several systems will be shared among many users - like many office and education environments. There's no need to keep one particular laptop with you, just plug your G-Key into any GDium and it will work just the same.
The operating system on the G-Key is a specially customized Mandriva Linux, developed exclusively for the GDium.
Mandriva, MIPS, hypertransport USB, G-key for architecture ?
MIPS is famous for its hypertransport pipeline(8x speedy pipeline over cpu speed).
Not using drams is the new architecture for speed(drams need refresh time) and cost reduction(extra parts). However, Mandriva needs experience in designing Linux file system to rotate writing flash transistors to maintain the best mtbf(mean time before failure). Flash transistor could fail between 15,000 to over 1 million writes on the same transistor. Some data is needed from each flash manufacturers due to design and technology differences.
Submicron lithography size of flash transistor manufacture, changes the write time and temperature effects on life of transistors. Nand controllers may cause a Linux file system failure, if not synchronized.
re: Gdium
Did these guys hire the marketing team from GIMP to come up with their names?
Won't mater - without being able to use the INTEL codebase, it has FAIL written all over it (or should that be "échouer").