Via: The Little Engine That Could

The Future?

Via is certainly marching to the tune of a different drummer with its new processor.

It chews up practically no power (it’s total power at 1GHz is little more than the increase in power we see from just one speed bump in the Intel/AMD arena. It chews up practically no space (you could easily lose it in a pocketful of change).

The motherboard it’s due to come with is going to be small, too; you might be able to get it in a big pants pocket, which you can hardly do with an Intel/AMD motherboard unless you’re a clown.

OK, it’s not going to be the most powerful thing in the world, but for mundane Joe Sixpack tasks (i.e., occasional webrowsing/email), you could live with it.

In all honesty, I’d rather like to have a cheap computer I could carry around with me when trying to figure out what’s wrong with some relative or friend’s box. Today.

But look ahead a little. Make today’s machine 50-100% faster. Presume one form or another of storage technology that could give you a dozen or two gigabytes of storage without a hard drive’s weight.

What more does the average computer user need? Match it up with an LCD; hell, build it into an LCD, and you have a very nice non-power user home/office machine.

Then you make it cheap (not that Via is expensive now, but really cheap).

That ought to be good enough to attract over 50% of PC sales, if not 80%.

So long as there is no killer app that the average Joe Sixpack or Suit just has to have which requires oodles of computing firepower, small, light, simple will become more and more appealing.

That’s the Via strategy. Via may or may not be able to make it work, but in the long run, somebody’s going to make it work.

It’s the only alternative somebody out to break up the Wintel cartel has. They aren’t going to out-Intel Intel; AMD’s already trying to do that, and in any event, they’re Tweedledum and Tweedledee when it comes to “more, more, more.”

No, the way to take them out is “good enough, smaller and simpler.”

What Via Really Needs…

A TV That Takes Orders…

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