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:you can say whatever you want

[MrNaz]

Given that, as far as I can tell, the only difference between a laptop and a netbook is size, what he's really saying is that laptops are going to get smaller.

Could this man, perhaps, be a captain of some sort?

Re:you can say whatever you want

[ozmanjusri]

whether it's true or not is another thing

One thing that's absolutely true is that Microsoft reputation managers will be all over this article.

Cheap, ARM and Linux is the one combination they absolutely MUST discredit. Even if they can get Windows to run on it, the whole application stack that locks people onto the Wintel platform will be missing. Likewise, a $200 OS and $300 office suite simply aren't value propositions on sub $200 computers.

Expect an unprecedented level of FUD here.

Absolutely not.

[TrisexualPuppy]

What East is really saying is, "Behold. I shall inflate stock values by making false and pointless claims."

ARM already has a huge part of the embedded market in cellular phones. He is trying to make the claim that no one needs computing power, so everyone is going to switch to the cheaper ARM microcontrollers, and they will get a lot of licensing money as a result. But remember, netbooks are optimized for the net and only the net. If you want to do anything else mildly processor intensive like watching a HD video, good luck. (Even Intel's Atom processor is essentially an overclocked 486.) If you want to watch a DVD, good luck--your netbook is probably a little too small for that DVD drive!

Re:Absolutely not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the newer arm processors include video accelerators, which can play HD video, Tegra 2 for example but also many others.

Re:Absolutely not.

[TheRaven64]

A current ARM CPU is about as fast as a desktop CPU from 2002ish (although the GPU is much better, it has more RAM, and it comes with DSPs for offloading the most processor-intensive workloads). He's not saying no one needs computing power, he's saying that, for most people, ARM CPUs are already fast enough and that convenience is worth more than raw speed. It's not like ARM chips aren't getting faster, either. The Cortex A9, which is just starting to appear, clocks from 1-2GHz, supports out-of-order execution (unlike Atom) and comes in 1-4 core versions.

If you want to do anything else mildly processor intensive like watching a HD video, good luck

All of the recent ARM SoCs that are targeted at this kind of thing can decode 720p H.264 in hardware, some can decode 1080p and some, like the i.MX515 have hardware for encoding H.264 as well.

Re:Absolutely not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mind you, on a 19' screen, 720p is way more than enough.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather have at least 2160p on my 19 foot screen...

Re:Absolutely not.

[Areyoukiddingme]

Not quite true. Steam is big, yes, but Steam is hardly the whole market. What are the 11 million WoW players using, for instance. What are EQ and UO players using? What are players of original non-Steam iD games using? How about those EA games? Maxis games? The runaway ridiculously best-selling The Sims runs on gaming PCs, not cell phones.

Are there a whole lot of so-called "casual" gamers? Yes. Are there a lot more "real" gamers than is represented by Steam? Definitely.

Re:Microsoft could jump in with Windows 7 Mobile

[0123456]

Likewise, Microsoft could decide at any time to embrace ARM by porting Windows 7 to the architecture and making a thunk layer for existing CE apps, just like NT for x86 has a "WOWExec" thunk layer for 16-bit Windows apps and NT for x86-64 (XP 64, Vista 64, 7 64) has a "WOW64" thunk layer for Win32 apps.

But what would be the point when there are no applications for ARM Windows 7?

The only reason I use Windows on any of my computers is to run closed-source applications that only run on Windows; and they won't run on ARM Windows. Eventually companies might start selling ARM versions of their software, but that will take a long time unless Microsoft force them to.

Sure, Microsoft could release ARM versions of Word, etc, but if all you can run on your netbook is IE, Word and Powerpoint, why not run Linux instead?

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Sell out? Not sure what you mean by this. ARM sells (designs for) chips that can run Darwin, Linux, *BSD, RiscOS, Wince, Symbian, NewtonOS, and a host of others. If Microsoft chose to port Windows 7 to ARM, why would you regard this as ARM selling out?

Microsoft wont just agree to support ARM as is. It will have conditions attached to it. It won't be something so explicit as a requirement to stop supporting the other systems. It will be more insidious. One tack will be to nullify the advantage of other OSes. By requiring a cache large enough for Windows or memory requirement that will nullify cost advantage of Linux. Another tack would be to create a small variant of ARM that is incompatible with the others. Then due to the market dominance and/or shady undisclosed deals and pay backs, the window only version of ARM chips will be subsidized from the monopoly windfall in the MSOffice franchise.

Eventually everyone will be able to say, "we tried, but the market wants Microsoft. It is all free market you see!", while conveniently forgetting the backroom deals and tilting of the playing field done in smoke filled back rooms. The MsOffice franchise that is churning up some 25 billion dollars a year in profit, flowing through secret contracts wrapped inside non disclosure agreements, distorts the free-market continuum just like a black hole warps the space-time fabric.

Remember the original 150$ Linux netbook. How Microsoft suddenly extended the WinXP life by 10 years and strong armed Asus. How the one lap top per child project suddenly decided to add a 2GB memory chip, raised the price and foundered completely. Microsoft is not a 800 lb gorilla in the jungle clearing. It is a supermassive blackhole that influences everything in the galaxy.