India's $35 tablet does not run Crysis

Aakash the inexpensive tablet of India has been released. It is the result of the effort to make a cheap tablet dedicated to students. But is it a dream come? Look at the specs & features below:

• 7-inch 800 x 480 resistive touchscreen
• 366MHz Conexant CPU
• 256MB of RAM
• 2GB of storage (expandable via microSD)
• Android Froyo 2.2
• USB ports
• 802.11 a/b/g WiFi

When I looked at those I laughed so hard. I know this meant to be cheap but 366MHz Connexant CPU is just ridiculous. I remember that even in the era of Windows Mobile the O2 Atom had 416 MHz processor. And Google it people Connexant only produce processor for fax modems and projectors. And the touchscreen is a nightmare. Video below



There I said it. This is just a joke. If you want to make a cheap ass tablet leave it to the Chinese. Tata nano is meh but this one is unacceptable.

Yes, it's low spec, but it does everything they need it to do. You can download a textbook on it, watch lectures, type in notes.

Well the touchscreen is actually terrible :| Other than that other things are fine. 3 hrs battery and 300mhz cpu is not that bad.

366 MHz is meaningless by itself, that's what benchmarks are for. They claim that a 1 GHz ARM-based processor is comparable to a 1.5 GHz x86 family processor (such as the Intel Atom).

As far as it goes, other than video games that's probably plenty fast.

Originally posted by sgunhouse:

366 MHz is meaningless by itself, that's what benchmarks are for. They claim that a 1 GHz ARM-based processor is comparable to a 1.5 GHz x86 family processor (such as the Intel Atom).

And the term 'x86 family' is just as meaningless in this context. I think it's safe to assume the CPU is some sort of ARM, likely not something overly modern, so it's single issue, small L1 caches, probably no L2 at all, probably some sort of ARM8 or ARM9. ARM is quite a diverse family, the more powerful ones ( like the Cortex family ) are superscalar, have L2 caches, multiple cores, vector extensions and so on. Also, since ARM licenses designs instead of selling CPUs, companies are free to combine them with pretty much everything they can get away with - graphics chips, audio, memory controllers, network, USB, DSPs, video codecs, you name it. Whatever is used in these tablets is likely a low end SoC with everything, including CPU core, graphics, memory, USB, LCD interface etc. on a single chip.
Comparing that to anything x86 is difficult since the x86 family almost as diverse ( not to mention that ARM and x86 are completely different architectures ) - at the low end you have single issue, single core Atoms, at the other end you have Xeons, Athlons etc. with multiple superscalar cores, large caches, multiple memory controllers and so on. So, a low end ARM would probably be a little bit faster than a low end Atom at the same clock speed ( where the Atom would support higher clock speeds while the entire ARM machine would probably run on less power than the Atom CPU alone ), assuming they have comparable memory subsystems. A high end ARM would be a lot faster but nowhere near an Athlon64 ( even Cortex cores are only dual issue, modern x86 CPUs that aren't Atoms allow much more parallelism ), even if you clock the Athlon down to whatever the ARM runs at. It also depends on what extensions the ARM CPU has, what kind of workload you throw at them and how well your software is optimized for that specific ARM chip - multiple vector units, FPU designs, 'multimedia extensions', DSPs, 'Java accelerators' etc. are available.
So, '366MHz Conexant CPU' doesn't really tell us much at all. Sure, it will be slower than a Core2 Duo in pretty much every way imaginable but that's about it.

The only purpose of all the specs is making it as cheap as possible for students to buy it. And it aims for those who are not spendthrift or cant afford for a tablet.... Thats why not C2D or such kinda things.

But atleast it fulfill the very basic things until and unless we dont wanna play games or run bulk softwares for it.

Compare it to "the $100 laptop" (aka OLPC), since it fits the same purpose. Comparing it to a $600 tablet or laptop is pointless, since they couldn't afford $600.

But then again, it has to be usable. If the touchscreen is that bad, then maybe it doesn't suit the intended use ...