A Chinese company has developed the first computer costing around 1,000 yuan (125 U.S. dollars) using a Chinese-made Godson II CPU, and plans to put the computers into industrial production in June.

"We hope everyone can afford our computers," said Zhang Fuxin, an expert of the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences in charge of developing "Longmeng" computers.

Last year, a leading U.S. IT expert Nicholas Negroponte proposed a 100-dollar laptop for the "One Laptop per Child" project, and the bright green and yellow prototype was unveiled by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and Nicholas Negroponte in November.

The performance of Longmeng, or Dragon Dream, is equivalent to a 1G Pentium III desktop, according to Zhang. It is a computer, a DVD player and also a video game player.

The computer, equipped with standard PC accessories, is portable as it is the size of a textbook and weighs 500 grams.

In September 2002, the ICT manufactured the first Chinese-made CPUs, coded Godson I.

The Menglan Group in Changshu, east China's Jiangsu Province, began the Longmeng program last year.