A new toy arrived to my house today in the shape of a Gdium Liberty 1000 netbook. Based on a Loongson 2F CPU clocked at 900 MHz, the unit sports 512 MB of RAM, a 1024×600 LCD, and the usual array of external ports. Curiously absent is any form of internal mass-storage device. Operating system, applications, and data are stored on a 16GB USB-attached flash device with a dedicated port.
The operating system is a customised version of Mandriva Linux. Its GNOME GUI somewhat overpowers the small machine, rendering the user experience less than stellar. A less bloated user interface would likely have allowed for smoother, albeit less visually rich, operation.
The selection of applications directly accessible through the main menu system is more or less what is expected for this class of machine: a graphical file manager, web browser, email client, word processor, and some simple utilities and games.
The less visible applications present a more interesting collection. Certain packages appear to have been installed with little consideration for utility. For instance, including GDB but not GCC strikes me as odd, as does the presence of Hylafax on a machine with no modem.
On the multimedia side the Gdium certainly earns points for trying. Both VLC and Totem are installed, as are a number of xine plugins; the main xine application is however missing. Despite all the players available, video playback is performance is disappointing. Even a modest standard-definition MPEG2 video is enough to bring the player to its knees.
FFmpeg is there too, of course. The version found here reports itself as SVN-r11599 though it is undoubtedly patched to some degree, as is customary with distribution builds. Whatever may have been patched, I am pleased to see that nothing appears to have been disabled. A cursory review of the format list shows all the major formats are there, both encoders and decoders.
For a quick speed test, I ran a simple benchmark of FFmpeg on a selection of formats, and compared the results to the Beagle board at 600 MHz. In most tests the Gdium performance is within 10% of the Beagle board, faster for H.264 video and slower for MPEG2. This is unsurprising since FFmpeg has extensive SIMD optimisations for the Cortex-A8 ARM processor on the Beagle board. With floating-point-intensive audio codecs, the Gdium is 2-3 times faster than the Beagle, consistent with the limited floating-point unit of the Cortex-A8.
The Loongson CPU has SIMD capabilities, so compiler/assembler permitting, it should be possible to boost the multimedia performance considerably.