The Intel Atom looks to be a very promising product for people who want a very cheap, low-performance CPU. The motherboard and CPU combo shown to the left costs $79.99 at NewEgg.com, which is a steal when you consider that the only thing it is seriously lacking out of the box are disk drives, memory and a case. For about $170-$190 you can build a new dual core desktop based on the Intel Atom 330 processor. That's probably a little over $200-$220 if you want a big hard drive or don't have any hard drives that you can spare for it.This is the perfect set up for creating a console emulator rig. It has four USB ports, which leaves enough room on there for a keyboard, a mouse, and two USB controllers. Throw Windows on there and some XBox 360 controllers, and you should be all set to have a classic emulator system for really cheap.
I could also see one of these being used to run a Linux or FreeBSD-based web development environment or something similar to that. In fact, I might have to see if there is room in the budget once we pay off my Civic to buy these parts because I bet I could turn this into a good environment for hosting all of the tools needed to run a development environment for my Movable Type projects on it. It would also be a good environment for testing out iPhone applications in a networked environment. Might be worth investing some money into it if you have a need for a cheap computer or two for simulating web services and other things that a hand-held application would need to connect to.
Isn't capitalism great? 10 years ago, it would have been impossible to get a system with a cheap hard drive, a dual core CPU and 2GB of RAM for about $200.
10 years ago there were no dual cores, and 2 gigs of ram could only be handled by a server at tremendous cost. Computers have advanced quite a bit, altho the progress has been slower of late, and no new hardware types have come out, just continued miniaturization. Still, impressive tho. I don't even begin to understand CPU architecture and only have a marginal grasp on how they are created (the journalist's understanding really!)
I understand just enough about CPU architecture to know that there is absolutely no way in hell that I could design something as sophisticated as a modern CPU. It's not enough to just design a CPU that is capable of doing things, but to do it as well as these guys requires a staggering degree of intellect and education.
When I was in college, I used to make jokes about having a gig of ram. I still remember how excited some of the guys were when one of them was the first in the dorm to get the new Pentium processor. Doom and X-Wing ran smooth as silk.
Those were the days.