That’s right. ARM is set to take over the netbook market (yay!) and even more good news that their highly successful Cortex-A9 will get a revamp.
Shrinking the die down to 28-nanometer will provide a 40% performance increase and reduce power consumption by 30%. It should be available later this year. Now that will certainly be something for Intel to think about..
2 thoughts on “Faster, better ARM Cortex-A9 on the way”
My colleague points out that the “up to twice as fast as an ATOM 1.6Hz N270” (presumably at 2GHz) may be comparing a single core to a dual core A9.
The question remains when we’re likely to see an A9 in hardware priced (and speced) similarly to an Atom based netbook.
AFAIK, ARM gives Atom a run for its money already. While Intel is busy trying slowing down their processors to make them use less energy (and therefore also slower), ARM is busy ramping up speeds and still consuming less power.
Not sure if you’ve seen it, but there’s a video comparing web browsing between the two platforms. Of course, it’s just web browsing and not complete benchmarking, but it is certainly interesting..