EnlightenedOsote's blog: "TECH."

With 14 billion processors shipped to date, a whopping 4 billion of them in 2008, ARM is a silent giant in the computer industry. When a company that ships 90 processors a second wants to talk, I'm willing to at least hear them out. ARM has traditionally focused on the low-power mobile arena, but the company has come to realize that the same chips that decode Flash videos for cell phones can also do so on netbooks, set-top boxes, HDTVs, UMPCs, and so on. But ARM cores can't run Windows…or can they? And Linux-based OSes can't succeed on netbooks, right? Where will ARM chips play in the future of mobile computing?

I had a lengthy conversation with company executives earlier this week, who made a strong case for a transformation of the netbook market. They pointed out that processors like the Intel Atom have overshot the needs of the average consumer—that the rest of the system needs to catch up. And that's arguably true; in terms of performance, a Pentium CPU can surf the Web just fine, thank you very much. And in spite of efforts towards efficiency and battery life, most Atom-based netbooks just don't last that long, while ARM claims Cortex-A8 silicon can last through playback of three 2-hour movies or more than 9 hours of web browsing. That's impressive.

ARM argues that a 65-nm, 600-MHz Cortex-A8—that's the brains behind chips in the Palm Pre (a TI OMAP 3430) and the Amazon Kindle (a Freescale IMX31LVKN5C)—can render pages in less than 5 seconds, comparable to a 45-nm, 800-MHz Intel Atom. "In 2009/2010, the 45-nm Cortex-A9 will render pages in less than 3 seconds, faster than an Intel Atom at 1.6 GHz," claimed company documents.

But the company's real advantage lies in the dramatically reduced power consumption of its chips, which run cooler in the same space. When its 45-nm chips come out, ARM hopes for dramatically lessened power consumption. But what about Intel? The company isn't standing still, especially on the power consumption front, and Moorestown might be just what it needs. The next-gen Atom platform integrates GPU and memory controller onto the main die, while the I/O hub will be a separate chip. At Computex, Intel publicly stated that it's shooting for a 50-fold improvement in idle power over the current Menlow device. Not too shabby. ARM argues that "Cortex-A8 SoCs today in 65-nm are even 50x more efficient than Moorestown (45nm) on standby power."

The other big issue centers on the concept that Competition Is Good, spawning innovation and bringing down prices. There's really just a single hardware platform in the netbook world today—Intel Atom. But ARM-based chips come from six semiconductor partners: TI, Freescale, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Marvell. Let them compete for business and prices could really come down--ARM talked about $199 unsubsidized models, and maybe even $150 netbooks.

Hardware aside, netbooks famously struggled at first due to the Linux operating system. That's why today's netbooks run predominately Windows XP. But in our testing, Windows 7 runs just fine on these things, and delivers a darn fine experience. Won't people and companies start adopting it? The challenge hardware manufacturers have been wrestling with is convincing consumers that netbooks are really just appliances, devices to surf the Web, e-mail, and do little else. Win 7 practically begs you to install a few programs, and when you realize how slow Outlook runs on it...

I couldn't pin down ARM on whether its chips will run Windows; the closest execs would come is to state that there aren't any technical limitations to it happening. With Intel's close partnership with Microsoft, I wouldn't count on seeing compatibility any time soon. But ARM likes working in close partnership with software developers anyway, and it's already a part of Google's Open Handset Alliance. It likes Chrome OS already.

What's really going to determine whether Chrome succeeds is the look of the darn thing. Does it act like a cell phone, presenting merely the four or so functions it's optimized for? Or does it act like a Linux operating system, inviting you to install new programs that won't run very effectively? That user interface is what's really going to spell out for consumers the difference between this type of device and a laptop, and will determine its success, more so even than price.