The Chinese love small cheap computers but they have need of home-grown chips with more power. While AMD+Intel are cranking out 32nm chips with billions of transistors in 4-12 core models, the Chinese have an 8-core 65nm job with 128 gigaFLOPS in 40W and about half a million transistors. Who are you going to call when you need a super-computer? Cost and performance per watt are going to direct you to the Chinese development.

see Chinese dark horse eyed nervously by bookies

It looks to me as the Chinese who emerged from the Stone Age of IT a decade ago are only one step behind and already competitive. They will soon be able to ignore Wintel.

They want to keep cranking out hair-driers while the world is crying out for small cheap computers. They are thinking tablets will not take off until the price drops to $300. Losers. They see 20% growth in netbooks and still have nothing in the works until 2011 and ARM blows it away.

A Federal Court of Canada decision that Amazon’s “one-click” method of doing business could be patentable will be appealed to the Federal Court of Appeal. Let us hope that sanity prevails. The patent application will be re-examined. Let us hope that the examiner does a more thorough job of showing how silly patenting methods can be. There is no difference between a method of doing business and a mathematical expression. It is a method of processing information in Amazon’s case, abstract and not patentable. If you can patent method A and method B. Is method A+B patentable? What about A-B? Wake up, commissioner!