NEC Launches "PowerMate Eco" Green PC 249
jdstahl writes "NEC has just released the PowerMate Eco, billed as the world's first environmentally-friendly PC. Based on a 900 MHz Transmeta Crusoe (thanks Linus!), it is ultra-compact, ultra low power, and nearly silent. Its motherboard contains no lead, and the case is made from recycled plastic. Its expandability is limited, so this is probably not a geek-box, but it seems like an appealing choice for Joe Desktop."
New improved FP version 4.0 (Score:1, Funny)
Now with 500 hours free.
No fan (Score:1)
Re:No fan (Score:2, Informative)
jrbd
Re:No fan (Score:2, Insightful)
IMO, I would feel better, if I were to buy one, if it had a slow, quiet fan.
Re:No fan == good for home theater/music room (Score:2)
Re:No fan == good for home theater/music room (Score:2)
Re:Get a PowerMac G4 Cube! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:No fan (Score:2)
When the air conditioning breaks, which in my office happens two or three times a year, usually in late July or early August when the temperature is cracking the triple digits and the humidity is measured by hanging a dry towel outside and seeing how long it takes it to start dripping.
But... (Score:5, Funny)
George Carlin once said... (Score:2)
"If it's true
Re:George Carlin once said... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:George Carlin once said... (Score:2)
Absolutely... he said:
It might be the answer to the age old question:
Why are we here?!
"PLASTIC
Re:But... (Score:4, Funny)
What I *really* want w/a PC is an EDIBLE one. You use it for 2 or 3 years and you are ready to move on to a new one...
You take out all the components you want to save and you eat the rest! Yummmy. Thanks Linus
Re:But... (Score:2)
Not quite on the subject of computers, but my parents bought a German Trabant car 10 years ago (one of the last production ones)... and the body is made out of a compressed paper, and you can get this special chemical which dissolves it completely!
Although with a 2 stroke engine (almost like a lawnmower) and for gasoline you have to a 1/4 oil per refill, it ain't that great on the emissions front, but slipstreaming behind HGV's works a treat!.
Re:But... (Score:2)
BUT, the 600 cc, 2-cycle engine emissions more than makes up for it, and if you get in even a minor ding, the whole thing is toast. Along with you.
German Trabant = ex-East German Trabant. Quite possibly the most disgusting, unsafe vehicle sold in the last 50 years.
Re:But... (Score:2)
but how about the manufacturing process? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:but how about the manufacturing process? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ummm, those are the concerns that make it valuable to eliminate the lead and boron from the manufacturing process (and from the discarded system). It's not because you'll be licking your motherboard.
As you said, it's a step forward. It's not like angels will come down from heaven to declare "Green!" has been achieved.
Re:but how about the manufacturing process? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, we can't get there in one jump, but need to concentrate on the big ones first and keep going until we get a system that is sustainable. That's the only way we and are descendants will get to stay here in the long run.
Re:but how about the manufacturing process? (Score:4, Interesting)
You could say something like "this nuclear power plant is environmentally friendly." Well, true that it may not harm the environment as *much* as other alternatives, but it isn't totally pollution free either; but there really isn't much manufactured that is.
Point being, I think "green" is a term much deserved by manufacturers who are thinking about the environment when building their products. I think it shows responsibility and even has a tint of higher geekdom to it.
Re:but how about the manufacturing process? (Score:3, Informative)
Not all lies are FUD. FUD is fear, uncertainty, and doubt. When MS says the GPL is a virus that will infect all your source code, that is FUD. If I say my widget will process 3 trillion zonks per second and was made entirely from recycled used toilet paper, it may be a lie, but it isn't FUD.
Re:but how about the manufacturing process? (Score:2)
where will it go?
Asia, probably.. [bbc.co.uk] but it is a step in the right direction. Even though most computers can be useful enough to donate to other less fortunate countries, people need to be more aware of how to achieve this [bbc.co.uk] and have easier accessabilty to do it.
Re:but how about the manufacturing process? (Score:5, Funny)
AMD had been working on a new CPU fabrication process based on hemp fibers and herbal extracts instead of silicon and solvents, but the government shut the project down after lobbying from chemical and mining companies.
Re:but how about the manufacturing process? (Score:2, Interesting)
Vote Libertarian [libertarian.org]
Re:but how about the manufacturing process? (Score:2)
LCD danger... (Score:3, Insightful)
mercury in their backlights
1) LCD's do not need to use fluorescent lamps, they can use LED's. Even with fluorescent lamp it's a step in the right direction.
2) The power savings of using an LCD is significant.
CDRW (Score:5, Interesting)
Also applies to all those AOL CDs.
Re:CDRW (Score:1)
Farming! (Score:2)
Well for CD's in general (apart from the usual drink coaster option), they're great for agricultural use with regard to scarecrows... string loads of CD's on one and they move in a gentle breeze (as well as the reflectiveness of them) and frighten off any birds.
Although the scarecrow to CD ratio may not be enough to deal with a minute amount of those damn AOL CD's floating around the planet.
Re:Farming! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Farming! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:CDRW (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:CDRW (Score:2)
A while I remember a site that sponsored a contest for the most creative use of AOL CDs. One person covered there car with them. Looked kind of like fish scales, only bigger. I may have even seen it on slashdot, but it is too far back to remember for sure.
Re:CDRW (Score:2, Funny)
The key is to not crack the cds. You need to use flexible washers of some sort and drive the nail through the center hole of the CD, making sure to overlap them like you would normal shingles.
Note that I have not tried this yet, but I plan to build a small outbuilding to house a generator in the not so distant future, and I have started saving up AOL CDs. One hinderance to my stockpile is that they are so much fun to shoot with a pellet gun.
Re:CDRW (Score:2)
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if the art departments in colleges/schools would take them. They could make very interesting pieces of artwork.
Good Idea (Score:1)
Sweet! Now I can hook it up to my... (Score:2, Funny)
Isn't Lead just one of the problems? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Isn't Lead just one of the problems? (Score:2)
Also, the computer doesn't contain any lead, barium, boron, cobalt, or any of another 32 toxic chemicals found in regular computers. I don't think that includes the hard drive or CD-ROM, though.
Business plan. (Score:3, Funny)
2. Pray to god, rich Green Peace Loving geeks didn't all buy MACs.
Re:Business plan. (Score:1)
> 2. Pray to god, rich Green Peace Loving geeks didn't all buy MACs.
3. ???
4. PROFIT!
Sorry, someone had to say it.
Re:MAC (Score:3, Informative)
Will Joe Desktop pay $1600? (Score:5, Insightful)
* Price from PCConnection here [pcconnection.com].
Re:Will Joe Desktop pay $1600? (Score:2)
Re:Will Joe Desktop pay $1600? (Score:4, Informative)
The spec says it requires 18V DC at 4.44 amps. I believe that works out to about 80 watts. So then assuming your saving about 200 watts over a conventional computer then
200 watts * 160 hours per month = 32 kWh
Electricity goes for about 8 cents per kWh so you save about $2.56 per month. Even if you have the machine for 5 years you only save $153.
Re:Will Joe Desktop pay $1600? (Score:4, Informative)
Not only are they low power but you can get cheap mostly metal cases (in black too) and they are almost silent, including an option of no CPU fan.
Finally as sites like www.mini-itx.com show you can recycle insane things like bread bins, sparc ipx's and even a nes as cases for them
Re:Will Joe Desktop pay $1600? (Score:2)
Re:Will Joe Desktop pay $1600? (Score:2)
Questions (Score:2)
Are Transmeta microprocessors manufactured in a particularly environment friendly way?
Why is NuCycle plastic good?
Re:Questions (Score:2, Funny)
I don't know, but I hear that GNuCycle plastic is open-recipe.
NuCycle Plastic: more info (Score:4, Interesting)
From the press release:
In addition, the PowerMate eco is also made of NuCycle(TM) plastic - an NEC patented plastic that is 100% recyclable. NuCycle is made of polycarbonate resin mixed with a special, flame-retardant silicone compound. Other computer plastics have flame retardant brominated coatings applied, which do retard flames, but produce harmful gases in the process. NuCycle's flame retardant is non-toxic and built-in, requiring no toxic coating.
Run X Windows to reuse the screen (Score:2)
And you can also recycle the Windows Operating System when you do that, because you'll be using Linux.
I wonder... (Score:2)
So this PC is environmentally friendly. IMHO, that's a Good Thing, in fact a Very Good Thing. A higher cause than free technology.
However, I understand that the Crusoe chips use patented technology. How would someone more zealous than I react to this clash between environmental protection and technological freedom.
Would the consensus be simply that being environmentally friendly is a good thing, but that a more open design could be made even more environmentally friendly due to peer review?
thumbs down. (Score:1)
But I do like the ecofriendly aspect.
Question: (Score:4, Insightful)
A:Rarely. Sales of SUV's greatly outnumber sales of hybrid vehicles.
This item will experience low sales volume.
Thanks Linus! (Score:4, Insightful)
(Saying thanks Linus is about as absurd as thanking your local mechanic for the sleek body styling on your new BMW.)
Re:Thanks Linus! (Score:2, Interesting)
You don't get Crusoe.
Crusoe uses RISC instruction sets, which allows computing with FAR fewer transistors than x86 instruction sets. The WORLD has been locked into x86 because Microsoft's support for other instruction sets has been lacking (they killed Alpha NT, and now they are slow to the mark with the new McKinley 64 bit chips which will STILL support legacy x86 instruction sets). X86 is just inefficient, and that causes CPU power consumption to go up.
The software engineering is critical - they have to take in x86 instruction sets, map them to RISC instructions, and execute them in near real time. This is the CRITICAL aspect of Crusoe. Instead of using an inefficient CPU, use an efficient one and map those inefficient instructions to efficient ones.
Without this remapping it should be possible to run linux on the NEC machines (which, BTW, ship with Windows installed), but it would not be possible to run Windows.
Re:Thanks Linus! (Score:2)
Crusoe isn't a RISC processor like you claim. It's a VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) processor. Diferent things here. That's where it get's it's simplicity from, by doing most of what the hardware usually does in software.
As for RISC vs. CISC... Intel hasn't designed a CISC chip in years! Today's x86 chips (Intel or AMD) are much more RISC chips than they are CISC. They run a small instruction set and then a small piece of software (the microcode) that does the translation of the x86 instructions to the basic hardware-level instructions.
This is how they're able to produce these stellar clock rates. Very small instructions (hence the RISC) that are composed to form the x86 ISA in all it's glory.
A good decision would probably be scraping the backwards compatibility cruft from x86 and moving on to a cleaner x86 based ISA. As far as I know the x86-64 from AMD still supports code for the 8086 and that is just crazy.
Re:Thanks Linus! (Score:3, Informative)
Much of the Crusoe's power savings can be attributed simply to not trying to push the performance curve so far. IIRC, Intel responded to Transmeta's products by putting out a slower, power optimized Pentium-III that was almost as frugal as the Crusoe. This was done with mainly with process tweaks and underclocking.
Re:Thanks Linus! (Score:3, Informative)
That statement is wrong on both counts.
CISC and VLIW can be far more power efficient than RISC because the large instruction is executed with special hardware, rather than emulated by lots of little RISC instructions.
Power in the architecture goes up when you try to get fancier and fancier with caching, prediction, and parallel execution to get the most out of any instruction set.
Crusoe get's its power gains (or losses) from slowing itself down or sleeping alot. Crusoe is also lower power because it sacrifices a lot of performance. But this point was beaten to death years ago.
I'd like one... (Score:2)
This'd be a killer item at half the price.
Re:I'd like one... (Score:2)
Re:I'd like one... (Score:2)
(At home our circuit's a little overloaded, printing on my laser printer can sometimes trip it.. A low power-PC would be nice, heh.)
"thanks Linus!" ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that Linux doesn't deserve help for starting Linux!
Cheers,
Vic
Re:"thanks Linus!" ? (Score:2)
Re:"thanks Linus!" ? (Score:2)
Torvalds Torvalds, he's our man!
Cheers,
Vic
Re:"thanks Linus!" ? (Score:2)
I use intel(thanks Mr. Moore!)
and what matters most to consumers (Score:3, Interesting)
sure. my dual proc setup is full of nasties, but i'll sell it someone after two years who will use it for another five at a quarter of the price of a green pc which will be outdated quicker and wont be able to be expanded.
price will always make or break just how "Enviromentaly friendly" something is. atleast how seriously people will take it
cool (Score:1)
CDW Has It Priced... (Score:1)
So what if the motherboard didn't use lead? (Score:3, Interesting)
Flux wash cycle comes to mind. Sometimes some really nasty chemicals are used after a PCB or a fully assembled board goes through.
THere's some companies like culligan that provide negatively ionicly charged microbead epoxy balls to clean the flux wash of the flux and any other impurities that come out. What happens to those?
Another item to consider is the ventalation stacks coming from these pcb wash machines, most of the time they are just there for "ventilation" and do not have filtering systems on them.
I know these things because I have worked around the Dixon Landing road exit off of the 880 in Fremont CA in a number of consulting positions to these companies. Whenever you're sitting at the desk of some salesguy trying to fix his "insert windows issue here" they cannot resist telling you in great detail about the process and how wonderfully enviromentally friendly their shop is.
This is how bad it is in USA, I don't even want to think about what my wife saw in Malasia and the phillipines where these things are probably manufactured(shudders)
Re:So what if the motherboard didn't use lead? (Score:2)
I pretty much deadened my sense of smell, and quit after noticing that the (few) women working there were (all) going bald.
If you are familiar with the toxicity/corrosivity/flammability danger scale, several of the chemicals used in that plant (when I was there) were 5/5/4 or the like...
I remember kicking the sulfuric acid barrels (and running away) to get the fumes out of the barrel so that we could insert the (hand) pump to refill a tank on some machine.. If you didn't kick the barrel, the fumes would overflow when you inserted the pipe, and you REALLY didn't want to mess with those fumes.
And then there was the acid-bath machine..
Oh, did I mention the chlorine-wash machine that we had to clean out every few hours or so because it kept getting blocked up with green&blue crystals?
Ever so fun!
Its not a nice place to work.
Re:So what if the motherboard didn't use lead? (Score:2)
My contribution (Score:2, Insightful)
Are they kidding? (Score:2)
They forgot the best green aspect. . . (Score:2, Funny)
my computer biodegrades, what does yours do? (Score:3, Insightful)
Marketing anything as "eco-friendly" doesn't make it all that more enticing. That's why most "eco-friendly" items that find any wide use at all are there because it is regulated to be that way.
Crusoe is not a desktop processor (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been using a Fujitsu laptop now for about 3 months and I've decided that I will probably not buy another machine with a Crusoe chip in it. The function is fine and the clock speeds are reasonable.
The problem is, it "feels" slow. There's just this little bit of latency, particularly as something starts up for the first time, i.e. as the morphing is doing its bit. The more you are exposed to it the more annoying it becomes.
Its little things like this that are what ruin companies. Transmeta needs to do something about this or they will never make it as a mainstream desktop processor.
Re:Crusoe is not a desktop processor (Score:4, Informative)
It is very unlikely that you can really notice the speed of code morphing. It seems much more likely that you have a very slow laptop hard disk.
Stuff your laptop full of memory; put as much in as it will hold. Then see if it feels better. Things will still be slow, as they load from disk, but once they are loaded they should be much faster.
This is especially important if you are running a RAM hog of an OS such as Windows XP. When your system is low on memory it swaps some memory pages out to your hard disk; swapping to a slow laptop disk will be painful.
Also, if you have XP or Windows ME, be sure to turn "system restore" off!
Maybe someday you can install Linux on it; I would be interested to know if Linux feels any better.
steveha
Re:Crusoe is not a desktop processor (Score:2)
Sorry it took me a bit to get back to this. I have both XP and Redhat 6.2 running on the machine. They both have this "slow feel".
Re:Crusoe is not a desktop processor (Score:2)
I guess he could verify that by checking to see if the HD light is lit when he is experiencing his lags. This is the first I've heard of the Crusoe experiencing noticeable lags, and it seems likely that it's the HD doing it and not the CPU. After all, the ammount of CPU power required to display a menu is trivial, but when the menu's resources have to be loaded from the HD and something else is accessing it, I've seen Intel/AMD lag.
Re:Crusoe is not a desktop processor (Score:2)
No, you can't.
The actual instruction set for the Crusoe is secret. This is so that Transmeta can change it as much as they want. For all we know, every Crusoe chip made could be incompatible with every other one; it's not likely, but you get the idea.
You are just supposed to feed x86 instructions into a Crusoe chip.
steveh
October 2, 2002... (Score:2)
ObSimpsonsParaphrase: [thesimpsons.com] "This PC is fully biodegradable, dissolves instantly in water, and is powered completely by my sense of self-satisfaction."
~Philly
Re:October 2, 2002... (Score:2)
he has gotten email for quit some time. I have heard several of his interviews, and he has a pretty good grasp on the practical matters of recycling.
NEC still makes pc's? (Score:2)
I forgot all about them and they have seemed to stop selling them in the retail sector. I assumed that vanished.
A PC PC! (Score:2)
Tree hugging bunny fuckers! (Score:5, Funny)
1) Comes pre-installed with our special Cartmania! Linux distro. Whenever you open an xterm window, it hacks into that network of things they put on spermwhales to track them, and causes the tracking device to emit a lethal shock, killing the damned stupid animal and notifying the japanese of the animal's position so that you can collect your bounty. If you provide it with a list of god damn dirty hippies, it will notify them of each of the oversized fish you kill so that you can call them up and listen to them cry.
2) Uses silicon doped with enriched uranium, which has no desirable semiconductor properties, for no reason.
3) Onboard gasoline powered generator serves as an uninteruptable power supply, and runs constantly, even when machine is off.
4) Using our patented "bassmaster" technology, fan produces constant, 110 decibel throb (roughly as loud as a car horn,) at a frequency of only 175 Hz, to maximally penetrate floors, walls and ceilings. This places you in handy violation of most of those intrusive noise ordinances that red meat eating, tree hating Americans despise so much. For a small extra fee, we can supply you with special "superscreech" hard drives to supply treble.
5) Special catalytic circuitry produces extra ozone - with the fan running at full capacity, and a constant supply of ozone-free air, the mother board alone produces 25 mg of ozone per minute; that's enough to sustainably exceed the OSHA safe limit of 5 ppm in a 5,000 square foot room. Don't worry! At ground level, ozone is a deadly pollutant - it won't rise into the upper atmosphere and can't do anything to screen out the sun's deadly ultraviolet rays.
So, if you're a real american, and if you hate the earth, you should definitely try our EcoHostile PC. Building a more dystopic tomorrow!
Integrated Monitor Environmentally Unfriendly (Score:2, Insightful)
What we really need are for the $200 machines to shrink down to a 1/4 size form factor, lose all the moving parts (especially the fans), and use Crusoe amounts of power. It would be extra-spiffy if there were a better small-component specification such that they could still have components upgrated. On the other hand the only thing I upgrade is the video card for better 3D performance.
This computer will go great (Score:2, Funny)
Yes, I am a hypocrite, and I can't spell either!
Now to hit previe
laptop... (Score:2)
If it was also low cost, i'd be super interested.
Wow, theres a novel idea - a light, lowcost, low power laptop.
Laptop components in Desktops (Score:2)
in desktop components. Modern desktops, even the
simple "just office work" PCs, are too
power-hungry, too hot, too loud. If desktops used
notebook CPUs, a major problem of these computers
would be solved...
Yes, I'd love to buy a Transmeta desktop mainboard
at my local PC reseller. At present, I can only
get a developer board at high prices through
imports. I want a consumer version. Please...
Why? (Score:2)
Mobos (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a couple labs where I'd love to stick some inexpensive, quiet, low-power systems that have decent speed.
I've talked to at least a dozen people with Crusoe laptops and they really like how long the battery lasts, how cool the system runs, and how surprisingly quick it is.
I want that on the desktop, damnit.
Already better: $200, 30 Watts (Score:4, Informative)
And most impressive: it's got a solid-metal case that's much more recyclable than any plastic, and costs one-eighth ($200) [caseoutlet.com] what the "Green PC" does ($1600).
Barebones!=all-in-one (Score:2, Insightful)
$200 is a little misleading. For that price, you get a system with:
It also has no Windows license. Not that one is necessary, but it's included in the $1600 price of the eco-thing.
You're also comparing the power draw of a headless box to that of a box & LCD.
That said, I'd still choose the VIA C3 over the eco-thing. It's cheap (even after you add the above components), configurable, small, and quiet.
Excellent just what every one needs... (Score:2, Funny)
As a desktop, the chip is utterly useless...Typically the cost of the morfing code its 20-30% reduction in apparent speed...So basically a 900 MHz crusoe would actually feel like a 600-700 MHz equivilent pentium processor...But this does buy you the fact that the chip is using significally lower power...Unfortunatly in a desktop, the decreased power usage really doesn't do anything for you and in no way makes up for the very poor performance....
Adding to the sad state of affairs with this desktop is price...For a third of the cost one can have themselves a machine with a processor that performs almost 2 to 2.5 faster just based purely on processor speed(the actuall performance differance is significantly higher due to other considerations such as pipelining and such)...I am not sure any fool would spend $1600 for a desk top that is clearly inferror then an e machine...(Well not counting Mac users..:-) )
It's been done (Score:2)
The IBM PS/2 Model E [tripod.com] was launched in 1993 as the 'green PC'. It has an LCD display which powers down when the machine isn't in use - amazingly, this was done by having passthrough connectors for keyboard and mouse hanging off the monitor, so it would know when there was user activity. The machine also supports the VESA power saving standard and its 2.5inch hard disk spins down when not in use. The PSU is a teeny 25 watts and there are no fans anywhere.
The single ISA slot is taken up with a PCMCIA adaptor, you can insert two PCMCIA cards in the front and two in the back. In fact the machine is really a laptop in a desktop case, but it makes a very cute (and very quiet) general purpose PC. The 486SLC2 processor won't win any performance awards, but with the onboard XGA-2 graphics hardware it's snappy enough. The machine can happily run Linux or NT, although limited by a maximum 16 megs memory.
And I don't think that IBM's effort was the first attempt at an energy-saving microcomputer, although it might have been the first hyped as 'green'. (The PS/2 E's case has a green stripe round the outside.)
Re:More info: the price (Score:4, Insightful)
However, this is a major step in the right direction, to reducing the amount of technological waste in the environmental facilities in addition to conserving power.
Re:As much as I love to thank Linus... (Score:2)
Thanks Linus!
- signed Billy G
Re:As much as I love to thank Linus... (Score:2)