Arm plans to enter the Netbook market

An Atom killer on the horizon

 UK-based world leader in mobile phone chip designing industry, ARM, has promised a significant departure from its current power-saving designs. The new architecture, codenamed Osprey, has been designed to provide the best in its class performance.  ARM predicts that it’s just announced processor series will be able to reach clock speeds of 2GHz and above.

These new CPUs will be based on ARM’s new Cortex A9 MPCore technology, which means they will have two, four and eight cores.  Moreover, they will only require a maximum of 1.9W (for a dual core version) and ARM estimates that A9 will offer at least twice the battery life of Intel Atom making ARM’s proposition far more superior when comparing them on a performance/Watt criteria . These processors will be made using TSMC’s latest 40nm-G fabrication process. Eric Schorn, ARM vice president of marketing in the processor division said that the new processors are expected to be 70% smaller than the already tiny Atom, what should make them significantly cheaper than its competitor. They are expected to hit the market of netbooks and smartbooks in 2011.

A major disadvantage of all ARM processors is a lack of support for Microsoft Windows (PC version) which will definitely be a limiting factor for Osprey. Schorn however predicts that by 2011, other mobile platforms will be very popular in this segment. These include Google Android, Ubuntu (and other versions of Linux) as well as Windows CE and Windows Mobile of which upcoming 8^th, revolutionary edition may actually end up being a selling point of Osprey platforms.

ARM also plans to go even further in the future and compete with Intel in the high-end segment, however no details have been revealed and for now it will be very interesting to see the war for netbook segment among all major manufacturers (Intel, AMD, VIA and now ARM). The good news is that consumers always benefit from high level of competition.