ARM Attacks Intel's Netbook Stranglehold

Barence writes "British chip designer ARM is launching an outright attack on Intel with the launch of a 2GHz processor aimed at everything from netbooks to servers. ARM claims the 40nm Cortex A9 MPCore processor represents a shift in strategy for the company, which has until now concentrated on low-power processors for mobile devices. In the consumer market, ARM is pitching the Cortex A9 directly against Intel's Atom, claiming the processor offers five times the power while drawing comparable amounts of energy. 'It's head and shoulders above anything Intel can deliver today,' ARM VP of marketing Eric Schom claims. However, it has one major hurdle to overcome: it doesn't support Windows. 'We've had conversations with Microsoft and you can imagine what they entail,' says Schom."

Comments

Re:Goody

[TheRaven64]

Any half-decent OS (I think this even include Linux these days) uses the same drivers on multiple architectures with just an abstraction layer for dealing with the different busses. OpenBSD on ARM, for example, supports exactly the same set of USB devices as OpenBSD on x86, including things like USB video cameras. If anything, supporting multiple architectures improves the quality of the code. NetBSD and OpenBSD both recommend testing all drivers on x86 and SPARCv9 and this has helped find a lot of bugs that are not obvious on x86 but crash on SPARC, which has improved the drivers and benefitted x86 users.