there's a great mediacenter built on X86 architecture but using linux as the OS.

http://www.vwbinc.com/products.html

with a VIA processor @1Ghz it can easily be compared to the Pegasos based mediacenter.
It's only 700$ !!

excuse moi, mon ami. but it can be what ?

there is a 1Ghz VIA-CPU in this "machine" and there is a 1Ghz PPC-Cpu in the other mentioned machine.

If anyone wants to test drive both machines iu have an unused 1Ghz Via-CPU which i can give away for this testing purposes.
At the end of the test we all have a lot to laugh about.

Cheers,
H.


P.S.: I have assembled VIA based "media-centers" for customers who wanted one because of it's "green-computing". there is one thing that saved my busines. in germany you can not return a product that was only assembled for you !

@heinrich.lehmann

you're absolutely right, i didn't mean to compare the VIA and PPC performance. I just think that this mediacenter can be a good challenger for the Genesi mediacenter. It's cheap and it runs linux.

O.K. that's cool. i just was so shocked to read this that my brain blocked

The only reason the Genesi Home Media and Communication system is more expensive than this machine is because we build them one by one and not per ten thousand.

Given sufficient venture capital to produce a large number, we can easily compete with this VIA machine, price-wise. Feature-wise and performance wise we are already doing better, but we will continue to optimize and improve.

The Genesi HMC has continued to evolve, new technology has become available (XGI) and we hope to have a new revision of the HMC in the store some time in the near future. The new version will be reduced in size (low-profile, with external PSU, slot loading laptop model combo-drive) and have additional features compared the current model.

Please also see these third party independent Digital Entertainment benchmarks showing a clear advantage for PowerPC compared to chips such as Transmeta Efficieon and AMD Geode running at the same frequency:

http://metadistribution.org/eembc.pdf

The eembc benchmark is one of the points that supported my opinion, the other one was my personal experience with VIA-CPU's.