New processors designed by ARM will soon find their way into netbooks, says the company's director of mobile solutions, Rob Coombs. ARM is more commonly associated with the low-power processors used in many smartphones, including Apple's iPhone. ARM is working on a successor to its ARM11 architecture, dubbed Cortex-A8, which Coombs notes should be fast enough for both smartphones and netbooks. Some individuals are "playing around with gigahertz speeds," Coombs claims. Due in 2010 is Cortex-A9, a multicore variant of A8 which should also be more power-efficient due to the ability to execute multiple instructions at nominally slower speeds.
It is not known which companies may decide to build Cortex-based netbooks, but Coombs notes that some of ARM's clients include the likes of Samsung, Panasonic, NEC and Toshiba. Finished products would present a direct challenge to Intel, whose Atom processors are effectively built for netbooks and other mobile Internet devices (MIDs). A future version of the Atom may threaten ARM, through inclusion in smartphones. It is rumored that Apple may switch to Intel processors with successive iPhones.
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