Tom's Hardware Spys The Malata PC-88001 At Computex

When you go to a tradeshow you can always expect to see some products that look suspiciously like other products that have either been launched at the same tradeshow, or are already on the market.

This expectation was fulfilled in a huge way with all the netbooks and nettops we saw over the last week. It seems like everyone wants a slice of the market that the EeePC opened up. We’ve even seen updated versions of the original EeePC.

It’s with all these announcements of new netbooks that one of our intrepid editors stumbled upon something at Computex this week (and some of the best finds come from things you just happen past on your way to somewhere else). So what was it ?

“A perfect copy of the Asus Eee PC 900 at the AMD booth,” he says. It carries the brand Malata, which is a Chinese manufacturer and is apparently only selling to OEMs, he reported.

A little checking around told us that the Malata PC 81001 has been around for a while now but it’s difficult to pinpoint when exactly it was launched because while it is featured on the company’s website, that website is in Chinese, and it doesn’t appear at all on the English version.

No AMD spokesperson was available to answer our questions at Computex so we couldn’t ask what CPU is in there, or if it will ever be sold worldwide however we did manage to find a rather good article on ZDnet (translated pages here), which not only gave us product specs, but also let us in on how well the Malata performed compared to the Asus and Intel’s Classmate.

Here are the specs we’ve managed to piece together from the Chinese website and the translated ZDnet pages :

CPU type : AMD (Geode) LX800
CPU power consumption : 0.9 W
Maximum speeds : 500 MHz
Front-side bus : 200 MHz, 400MT / S
A cache : 64 KB Instruction cache/64KB Data cache
L2 cache : 128 KB
Memory : 256 M DDR1 DRAM
Memory frequency : 400 MHz
Display : 8” (800x480)
Battery Pack : 19.4Wh

Related Links

ZDnet : Low-Cost Laptops Round-up (English Translation)
Malata PC-88001 as featured on the company website
www.Malata.com (English version)

Editor’s Note : Yesterday we reported that the notebook we saw at Computex was the Malata PC 81001. We have since realised that what we saw at the show was another version of the unit ; the Malata PC-88001. We have updated the product specs accordingly and the link to the 81001 on the Malata website now redirects to the 88001.