This looks promising, possibility of even cheaper netbooks...
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2350193,00.aspWith 14 billion processors shipped to date, a whopping 4 billion of them in 2008, ARM is a silent giant in the computer industry. When a company that ships 90 processors a second wants to talk, I'm willing to at least hear them out. ARM has traditionally focused on the low-power mobile arena, but the company has come to realize that the same chips that decode Flash videos for cell phones can also do so on netbooks, set-top boxes, HDTVs, UMPCs, and so on. But ARM cores can't run Windows…or can they? And Linux-based OSes can't succeed on netbooks, right? Where will ARM chips play in the future of mobile computing?
I had a lengthy conversation with company executives earlier this week, who made a strong case for a transformation of the netbook market. They pointed out that processors like the Intel Atom have overshot the needs of the average consumer—that the rest of the system needs to catch up. And that's arguably true; in terms of performance, a Pentium CPU can surf the Web just fine, thank you very much. And in spite of efforts towards efficiency and battery life, most Atom-based netbooks just don't last that long, while ARM claims Cortex-A8 silicon can last through playback of three 2-hour movies or more than 9 hours of web browsing. That's impressive.
