Analyst: ARM to surpass Atom, in 55% of netbooks by 2012

“Analyst: ARM to surpass Atom, in 55% of netbooks by 2012Intel’s
netbook dominance has yet to be challenged in a serious way, but at
least one business analyst thinks that’s going to change in the
next 2-3 years. The netbook market is extremely new; Atom itself
isn’t even a year old–if the IT industry were to break with the
existing Intel+Microsoft model, the emergence of a new product type
combined with a deep economic recession could be the perfect
opportunity to do it.

“Analyst Robert Castellano from The Information Network believes
future netbooks based on the upcoming ARM Cortex-A9 architecture
and running Linux could create a market for netbooks at price
points Intel and Microsoft simply won’t be able to match. Not only
would the multicore A9 be cheaper than a 2012 Atom (at least,
according to Castellano), the assumed ubiquitousness of cloud
computing would supposedly eliminate (or almost eliminate) the need
for local storage.”

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