Still and all, like I said at the outset, I'm rethinking my position. That's due mainly to two new pieces of information. First off, thanks to TG Daily, I have a better understanding of where Intel is coming from here. That would be, from a position of extreme profit. TG Daily reports that Intel is manufacturing the Atom for $8 a pop and selling it for up to $135 each. As they say in Silicon Valley, sweet.

What's interesting about this is that it turns Intel's traditional fabrication model on its ear. The chip giant has long made the most profit on its fanciest chips. That's one reason it constantly strives to crank out new, cutting-edge dual- and quad-core SKUs. Simpler stuff was cheaper on the food chain, cranked out at fabs which have long been amortized. These limper chips (no offense intended) were less expensive and contributed less profit, but it didn't matter because the cost of production was negligible, comparatively speaking.

Well, now Intel has apparently figured out how to get gold out of the old goose. Namely, it's found a way to fab highly profitable processors at the lower end of the cost spectrum. The trick to making a mint here, though, is that Intel's gotta stoke demand. That is, they have to create (pretty much from scratch) a real, and really big, market for the MID.

That is not going to be easy to do. Indeed, outside of the PC and cell phones (the latter being a market Intel largely doesn't participate in, processor-wise), no such humongous computing markets come to mind.

Which is why Gigabyte's MID is so compelling. It's a cool device which just might take off. So now I'm thinking that MIDs may not be so bad after all. Take a look at the Gigabyte MID, courtesy of this YouTube video from Intel. It was shot at the recent Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai. What do you think?

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