ramesh bios wrote:
The villages lacking indoor
plumbing are not the customer base that I think are
being targeted for broadband+PIC. I believe the target
base are the 50Million or so Indians who are in the
lower middle class. They have a monthly disposable
income of around USD$10 so they could pay off the cost
of a PIC over a year or two. These are people who are
teachers, farmers, artisans, barbers, sundry shop
owners ( and if I might say so, are a lovely people
whom I'd someday like to help by delivering a cheaper
free and open sourced based Linux solution to their
computing needs ). They already have indoor plumbing,
thank you very much. They typically want to use a PIC
to get things like current commodity grain prices, the
price of gas, exchange email and photos of their
family with their relatives in the city, figure out if
their politicians are doing right by them, and get
educational content for their children.
Why even consider x86? ARM SOC + LinuxARM can support broadband and all the above mentioned apps. for far lower price and power consumption. For example Freescale has an ARM SOC for <$5 (quan 1M+) with MMX type instructions, VoIP, SVGA, MPEG-4 decode 30fps, USB + Sound.
-Bari
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