We have known for many years that the future lies in cheap, good-enough CPUs. What do Intel and AMD crank out? Hearts for super-computers.

Wake up, folks. We read that ASUS is awash with Atom CPUs and is dumping them in China where they are good enough. Intel is upset that this reduces the market for high-powered CPUs.

I have been writing on these pages for years that China is a key market. This is more proof. The world will produce what China wants in software and hardware. China wants low-cost/power/heat CPUs and Free Software. They will get it whether Intel supplies them or leaves it to VIA/ARM/home-grown stuff.

What are the Chinese doing with Atoms, besides netbooks? Not much except cranking out ever-lower-cost netbooks that are good enough for browsing/word-processing. ARM is in the mix too. Atom has to be priced as low as ARM to keep share for Intel and Wintel. It is not. The market will decide no matter how much Wintel twists the arms of OEMs. Entrepreneurs in China have no interest in being co-opted by Wintel when they have a market in hand for all their production for years to come. The Chinese market is several times the size of the USA and netbooks are good enough for what they want. Why even try to sell fire-breathing dragons there?

The neat thing for me about China is that because they demand low-cost computing, GNU/Linux has the inside track. The newly announced pricing for that other OS prevents it from competing with GNU/Linux in this market. If they keep the price low in China, other countries will demand similar treatment. It is almost over, folks.

M$’s biggest product is vapourware but they do an excellent job of selling it one feature at a time in order to capture mind-share. OTOH anyone who looks at what is finally delivered as value/dollar will be shocked at what many pay for second-rate software. Remember the wonderful features for Longhorn Vista? They turned out to be worse than the features of GNU/Linux from years earlier. Then there was the malware. Backwards compatibility revived some from the ancient days of the web.

Now, the strip-teases is almost over. It looks like they will charge top-dollar for a service pack to Vista without a neat upgrade path from XP, the world’s most common OS.

Some will pay. They feel they cannot use their PCs without M$’s help. So helpless are they that they equate IT with M$. Others are more alert and have already figured out that they have been charmed by a snake. They have checked out GNU/Linux by the millions and will be adopting GNU/Linux rather than going with Vista II. Interestingly, wide adoption of GNU/Linux will scarcely bother M$’s bottom line, now that they are charging for service packs and the locked-in have agreed to remain locked-in. M$ can charge these folks whatever M$ wants. They will continue to pay.

The malware aretists are loving this. They can continue to target a single OS and reap huge rewards for years to come. The rest of us will be free for many years. It is all good.