Posted on Saturday, July 18 2009 @ 14:01 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
EE Times
writes analyst expect that the arrival of Google's Chrome OS will boost the switch from Atom to ARM-based processors in the netbook market.
While Intel's Atom holds more than an 80 percent share of the 23.5-million netbooks sold in 2009 the ARM processor will to gain a 55 percent market share of the 96.0 million netbooks sold in 2012, according to researchers.
"We see two technology factors converging with the poor macroeconomic situation that will create a market for ARM - the release of the Cortex-9 microarchitecture and the emergence of cloud computing," said Dr. Robert Castellano, president of The Information Network (New Tripoli, PA). "Chrome OS is the first operating system built with cloud computing in mind."
The researchers point out that ARM runs under the Linux operating system. Linux is free, whereas Microsoft charges a licensing fee up to $35 on each netbook. Linux systems have struggled against Windows in the netbooks market because of the lack of adequate productivity software that is familiar to consumers, particularly Office-based solutions running on ARM-based platforms.
