Archive for the ‘Cortex-A8’ tag
ARM’s next generation processor to be used in netbook systems
The netbook processor market has been thoroughly dominated by a single vendor thus far – Intel. While there have been a small handful of systems based around the VIA C7-m processor, the vast majority of netbook systems have all incorporated the Intel Atom processor. However, this will most certainly change in the months to come. AMD announced earlier this month that they would be detailing their netbook strategy at some point next month and now ARM has announced that they will be releasing processors that will also be destined for netbook systems.
In an interview with ZDNet.co.uk, Rob Coombs – Director of Mobile Solutions at ARM – announced that the company’s next generation processor, the Cortex-A8, would find it’s way into “small low-cost subnotebooks”. According to Coombs, “In the future we’re going to be in netbooks, .. Expect announcements in the next few months.”
The Cortex-A8 is the successor to the current ARM11 processor and is due out shortly while the Cortex-A9 is the multi-core sibling to the A8 processor and will probably come out in 2010. Devices using the Cortex-A8 processor are also due out next year. While Coombs refused to reveal who was making netbook systems around the A8 processor, he did tell ZDNet.co.uk to look at the company’s published list of licensees which includes companies such as Samsung, STMicroelectronics, TI, Broadcom, Panasonic, Freescale, etc. Companies signed up for the A9 include NEC, NVIDIA, STMicroelectronics, and Toshiba.
Operating System support for netbooks based around the ARM processor will certainly be interesting. While neither Windows XP or Windows Vista supports ARM, many other OS’s do support the chip architecture including Windows CE, several Linux distributions, and a version of OS X (namely the iPhone). One would assume that vendors coming out with Cortex-A8 based netbooks will most likely go with Linux since it’s free and will not require a paid license like Microsoft’s Windows CE.
In any event, it’ll be great to see many more vendors come into the processor market. Having multiple choices will certainly push the chip vendors to design and manufacture smaller, more efficient and more powerful processors in the long run.
