Cheap, low megaherz Linux computer with embedded DSP

Not good for editing, but they are fine for watching most video with a resolution appropriate to the screen size. My (original mobile, not Atom) EeePC chokes a bit on 1080p HD video, but then so does my desktop.

Sure, you could build a hardware accelerator co-processor, but the cost usually isn't going to be justified. Most video shown on these things is DVD quality or even youtube quality, and they handle that fine (actually youtube often looks better on the little screen than on a normal one).

What is on the market are embedded-linux-capable chips with DSP or hardware video acceleration blocks - Blackfin, various TI offerings, and maybe some of the digital camera/camcorder chips with ARM or MIPs cores could be made to run linux with or without and MMU. The issue there may be that they will do fine on video, but may choke on something more mundane such as open office (there is an ARM port, but I don't know what kind of resources are needed for reasonable performance).

The original EEEPC had a 900Mhz processor which is more than capable of playing MPEG2 and MPEG4 video. Howerver, I'm thinking about ultra-low cost (< $100) laptops with 200 to 400Mhz Chinese MIPS processors which are not capable of decoding video. Add a $1 Chinese generic DSP and you can do full-screen video both decode and encode and maybe even on the fly editing, whilst consuming only a fraction of the power of a modern Intel CPU.

And another possible feature would be that you can program these DSP's on the fly and reuse it for other purposes, such as 3-D accelleration, especially shading and texturing.

Got any links to $1 Chinese generic DSP's?

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It is called a Dual-core or Quad-core CPU.