Freescale Semiconductor has now announced that it will enter the popular netbook market and through its ARM-based processors it hopes to grab some market shares from Intel’s almighty Atom processor. Freescale has a pretty interesting plan for how this would work, which is basically to develop even cheaper netbooks. It hopes to build 3G capable netbooks with its own technology for around $100, systems that could sell for less than $200, considerably less than most other netbooks of today.
The heart of Freescale’s operation will be its ARM-based processors that it claims is more efficient than Intel Atom in several ways. ARM-based processors are more power efficient which leads to up to twice as long battery times, while they run cooler and cost considerably less. The new ARM Cortex A8 processor is the “hottest” candidate, presented at CES earlier this year.
Freescale will also focus on using open source software where it mentions Ubuntu, but also points to Google Android which is primarily marketed as a mobile phone operating system. Freescale has plans to announce netbooks on the Google Android platform next quarter already. It announced this during a press conference in Barcelona.
Intel has the ball and is controlling the market with its Atom processor, but there is certainly still room for more power efficient and cheaper netbooks. How functional a Google Android-based netbook really is remains to be seen, but the operating looks to be the biggest drawback of these coming netbooks as most Intel netbooks use Windows operating systems.
