Responding to our recent article about the $100 computer, Californian manufacturer NComputing got in touch to say they were already marketing devices which could beat that price. John Stokdyk reports.
NComputing CEO Stephen Dukker has a good track record in the PC world, having built up and sold his previous company eMachines to Gateway. Since then, however, he has done his best to undermine the PC industry's business model with a system design that harks back to the pioneering days of computer time-sharing.
In the past 18 months, NComputing has shipped more than 600,000 computer seats at an average price of $70, Dukker claimed.
"The premise of what we do is that even the lowest cost PC has fundamentally become a supercomputer," Dukker explained. "With the new chip manufacturing technologies and dual core processors, there has been a dramatic step up in computer power. But the evolution of user demands is more linear."
The NComputing system is based on a low cost PC in combination with very low cost access devices that exploit the PC's unused prcessing power. "The client devices do not do any computing, they reconstruct a PC experience," said Dukker.
The NC Terminals can run in tandem with any Windows or Linux PC, where the company's software creates 'virtual desktops' on the PC. The virtual desktop is compressed and sent to the terminal, which reconstructs the screen images and provides inputs and outputs for audio, keyboards and attached peripherals.
"It's not a PC - there's no CPU, no storage, and no software. We can build these devices for £5," claimed Dukker.
The NComputing concept was designed as a corporate tool, for example in training environments where equipment needs to be as cheap as possible. But since its inception, NComputing has been overwhelmed by demand from the education market.
"It's not by design, but by choice of the market," Dukker said. "When education and training became aware of the technology and validated that it did the job, they went into full deployment worldwide."
In Macedonia, NComputing has rolled out an installation that supports 180,000 student seats, with one PC serving seven attached terminals at an average cost of $170 per seat.
The Macedonian minister was attracted by the sustainability of the system, according to Dukker. The terminals use around 1 watt per user, compared to 80w for a PC. "Depending on daily usage, they can get a payback within one year on that alone," he said.
The timesharing model also provides a defence against obsolescence. When the central PCs become obsolete within a few years, NComputing users can upgrade the central system, but retain the shared terminals.
The systems are supplied with NControl supervisory software that lets a teacher or trainer monitor thumbnail images of up to 158 attached terminals, so educators can look over students' shoulders, download applications to their systems and direct them to specific web pages via remote control. "This is absolutely what teachers in the class room and tech support people use," said Dukker.
NComputer systems are being used for retail training at Tesco's subsidiary in Thailand, where 25-30 classroom workstations are running off the back of £300 PCs, and at Carrefour's south east Asia operations, Dukker said.
