The "next billion" find themselves in the middle of an IT battlefield

THERE WAS A LOT OF NOISE reverberating around the great halls of Computex about the "next billion" PC users.

These poor, web-less souls are the target for chip makers great and small in an effort to extend the market, possibly as the wired-up western world realises the continual upgrade cycle is a waste of money, effort and resources.

The fad was perhaps kicked off by Nicholas Negroponte and his suggestion for a hundred dollar PC. "All credit to Negroponte. He brought interest to the market," said a spokesVia, who asked to be nameless. Via began its PC1 initiative some while ago, with its aim of converting the "next billion" wannabe PC users. At Computex it unveiled its idea for PC 2.0, which has the slightly different aim of putting a PC in all of our pockets, whether we belong to billion 1.0 or billion 2.0

The key components the next billion require, as far is Via is concerned, are low power, affordability and low cost of ownership. As far as specs are concerned, we're talking web access, a bit of storage and a low-power processor to drive the thing.

Intel too trotted out the "next billion" line, as Sean Maloney strutted about the stage extolling the virtues of 45nm chips. These cheap, tiddly devices are going to everywhere within a few years. One will be powering the Asustek EEE PC shown off in Taipei for the first time. While we know some of the components in this machine, neither Asus nor Intel is yet ready to state which chip will be powering the device. Whichever one Intel can supply to keep the device under $200 bucks, it seems.

AMD of course supplies a 1.1W AMD Geode GX 500 to run Negroponte's PC. While we can't say we heard an AMDer banging on about the "next billion" in Taipei, its 45W processors introduced at the show evidence a new trend chip makers have cottoned on to. Rather than more and faster, they also like less and more efficient and both AMD's dual-core Athlon X2s, BE-2350 and BE-2300, are priced lower than its mainstream offerings, if somewhat higher than the depth of our next billions' pockets.

It did show off shipping DTX form factor boards for the first time and we liked SIS's little offering as it jumped the gun to show of a mini-DTX design that could have low-cost written all over it.

One problem US firms have when addressing the next billion consumers is the choice of operating system to bung in their cheapo boxes. Chairman Bill was heard to utter the words "next billion" in China last month, unveiling his $3 Windows package. Bill being a Vole, however, there were stings attached. One of these was that governments have to pick up half the tab for whatever PC the $3 package runs on.

Non-US companies may be equally constrained but not by the necessity of keeping a backdoor to every PC in the world open, for reasons of national security. Rather, the lack of viable alternative to Windows is holding back real development in the low-cost space. Asustek, while yet unsure which Intel chip it will be using in its EEE, also hasn't yet decided between Windows XP and Linux. And we can guess who's leaning on it hardest.

Shurely, it can't be that hard to come up with a low-power, low-cost OS that the next billion can get their heads and fingers around. µ