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Sunday, July 19, 2009

ARM Cortex + Google Chrome = Your Next Netbook?

From Extremetech -

While very few consumers are familiar with ARM, it is actually the processing power being popular devices such as the Palm Pre and the Amazon Kindle, and a lot more. In fact a whole lot more. ARM has shipped 14 billion processors to date, 4 billion of them alone in 2008.

ARM has traditionally focused on low-power mobile devices, but it has discovered its Flash-decoding chips can also work in netbooks, set-top boxes, HDTVs, UMPCs, etc. However since Windows can't run on ARM processors and Linux has not exactly been accepted as an OS for netbooks, ARM-based mobile computing devices have not exactly caught on.

That is not to say ARM chips are not capable. Its Cortex-A8 can last through 6 hours of video playback or more than 9 hours of web browsing. In fact a 65-nm, 600-MHz Cortex-A8, which is in the Palm Pre and the Amazon Kindle, can render pages in less than 5 seconds, comparable to a 45-nm, 800-MHz Intel Atom. And the next gen 45-nm Cortex-A9 (due out later this year) will render pages in less than 3 seconds, faster than an 1.6 GHz Intel Atom. In terms of power consumption, 65-nm Cortex-A8 SoCs are already 50x more efficient than Intel's forthcoming 45-nm Moorestown on standby mode.

And while Intel is the sole provider for its Atom, ARM-based chips come from six semiconductor partners: TI, Freescale, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Marvell. This encourages price competition, with ARM talking about $199 unsubsidized models and even $150 netbooks.

But hardware can only do so much without software, and this is where ARM has had problems since Intel's close partnership with Microsoft seems to have precluded compatibility with Windows so far. But Google's Chrome OS appears set to conquer just exactly the above-mentioned market segment. And Chrome OS works with ARM chips. So if users start liking Chrome, ARM will have a steady partner in achieving market success.

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