ARM Exec Says 90% of PC Market Could Be Netbooks

Barence writes "ARM chief executive Warren East has claimed that netbooks could dominate the PC market, in an exclusive interview with PC Pro. '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,' he said. East also said ARM isn't pressuring Microsoft to include support for its processors in Windows, claiming progress in the Linux world is 'very, very impressive.' 'There's not really a huge amount of point in us knocking on Microsoft's door,' he said. 'It's really an operational decision for Microsoft to make. I don't think there's any major technical barriers.'"

Comments

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[tjwhaynes]

I wonder how long I will go on musing for, before I break down and buy one...

For myself, I'd give it another 6-12 months to see what shakes out of the market. The Cortex-A9 quad core looks like it is the perfect chip for high performance, low power consumption tasks, and the Tegra 2 SoC looks like it will provide a moderate-performance GPU on top of that. There are a number of different form factors that look like they will hit the shelves over the next year, from single screen netbooks, dual-screen touchscreen folding books, a mix of tablets and tablets with removable keyboards. Hey - even Google is supposedly building a tablet based on this sort of tech.

The iPad is likely to find its niche suddenly becomes a crowded space by the end of 2010.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Tegra Performance

[thaig]

Try this on your atom:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5gYSgqka1A&feature=related

I think it just makes nonsense out of your performance argument.

Netbook?

[gmuslera]

Most could have a portable internet device in the next few years. But its shape could end not being the netbook one. Cellphones, and tablets also want a share in that space, and probably will be a mix of all. Cellphones are getting into shape to be good enough internet devices, and if you want larger screens,tablets with keyboards, hybrids (like Asus T91, cheaper, more powerful and with far more battery life), should be the most popular kind.

This will require fast, cheap and energy efficient cpus, and if well could not be netbooks, ARM and other non-intel (i.e. TI's OMAP4) cpus should have a good portion of the market in that scenario,and probably a lot will be somewhat linux based (android, moblin, maemo,etc)

Re:you can say whatever you want

[LWATCDR]

True but WinCE sucks as WinMo is in deep trouble.
Windows Mobile is really at the "also" ran level in the Cell Phone market.
Do you see any ads for WinMo phones? Not really. IPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Palm are all way ahead of Microsoft in mind share.
If Microsoft is going to be anything else but a footnote in the Phone market WinMo7 better be out tomorrow and be mind blowing.
Frankly I think Microsoft is loosing it's halo. Xbox360 has had a huge struggle with hardware failures. WinMo is old and clunky, Vista left a really bad taste in peoples mouth, Office is facing competition from Google Docs and OpenOffice, and Play For Sure failed publicly.
Microsoft does have a hit with Windows7 and Sync is very good but the list of fails and disasters from Microsoft is actually pretty dang large now.

I would say that Microsoft in every market except the desktop is now in a put up or shut up situation. The problem is that I don't think Microsoft knows it. I wonder if they feel that Android and iPhone are just passing fads.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[etymxris]

MS software for such things is mostly a waste of money. You'd have to be using fairly advanced features of Office software to notice any differences between open office and MS office.

Using open source applications in their current form is really not that hard, especially for people coming from a Windows world. If an employee can't handle that, then they probably aren't clever enough to handle most office work.

I also don't buy that admins are more expensive for Linux than Windows, though I'd consider evidence to the contrary. I agree that the cost of employees eclipses all other business expenses. I just can't see that Windows ability is really any cheaper than Linux ability.

For all that, however, MS license costs are nowhere near as ridiculous as stuff like SAP, AIX, DB2, Weblogic, Websphere, and Oracle.

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[Simon Brooke]

Netbooks are supposed to be those things too small to work like a real computer but too big to be really portable! How could Steve Jobs be wrong? Is it true that they are small enough to be more portable than a laptop but big enough to be more useful than a cellphone/PDA?

I wonder how long I will go on musing for, before I break down and buy one...

I bought one a year ago - a Dell Mini 9 with a 1.6GHz dual core Atom processor, 2Gb RAM, and a solid state device in place of disk. My desktop machine which I use for development is a dual processor Athlon 1.6GHz with 2.5Gb or RAM and a SCSI raid array. Both run Ubuntu 9.10. Which is faster? Well, for jobs like compiling, the netbook tends to be, because the SSD is a lot faster than physical disk. For everything else except 3d graphics, they're about equal. The ATI graphics card on the desktop does 3d better and faster than the Intel on board graphics chip on the netbook.

But the only places the desktop really has it over the netbook are graphics and disk capacity. The netbook has it over the desktop in terms of noise, size, weight, power consumption, portability.

Now, OK, mine's an Atom, not an ARM. But there really isn't that big a difference in performance between a dual core 1.6Ghz Atom and a dual core 1.2GHz ARM, and a four core 1.2GHz ARM will scare the pants off it. These days, a netbook really can give you all the compute power you need, and five plus hours battery life.