Netbook Review UK

While netbooks currently consist of about 10% of the current PC market, ARM CEO Warren East, says that’s about to change.  He states:

“Although netbooks are small today – maybe 10% of the PC market at most – we believe over the next several years that could completely change around and that could be 90% of the PC market,”

That, of course, would be great news for ARM – upcoming maker of netbook chips but we think 90% is probably overstating things a bit.  He also notes,  that while the main CPU in most netbooks may not be an ARM processor, there are probably at least two or three other chips inside netbooks manufactured by ARM.

Furthermore, in the company’s earnings call preceding the interview, Warren East dropped a few hints about ARM’s upcoming roadmap.  Notably, “Cortex-A9 will comfortably run at those sorts of frequencies (1GHz) and, indeed, with physical IP optimization, we demonstrated can scale up to 2 gigahertz today.” East further added that the “other Cortex-A9 has a lot more headroom to go, it’s a multi-processor design, so you can have quad-core — or up to quad-core implementation.”