The netbook market could be a 'substantially' bigger market than the notebook market, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs told The China Post last week.
Qualcomm has a chip-set for netbooks, and expects to see products based on it out in the second half of the year. Freescale also has a netbook chip-set out and has design-ins planned to launch in the second half.
Jacobs points out that the lower price of netbooks ($200 and less) could expand the netbook market 'very quickly' at the expense of notebook sales.
Both the Qualcomm and Freescale chip-sets are based on ARM processors. According to Jacobs, this gives netbooks the ability to last all day on a charge. By contrast an Intel Atom-powered netbook lasts a few hours.
Both Jacobs and Rich Beyer, CEO of Freescale, point out that the new metric for measuring computing performance is going to be power efficiency rather than CPU speed. This massively favours ARM which has always designed for power efficiency as against Intel which has always designed for speed.
Jacobs reckons ``the interesting dynamic in the industry right now" is providing a microprocessor alternative to Intel.
"They (Intel) are trying to come down from above to reduce power consumption and build a low-power processor, while bringing along the whole Wintel application developer community", says Jacobs, "we are trying to come up from the phone and focus on Linux, Android and these kind of operating systems and get our software good.''
Freescale is on the same netbook timescale as Qualcomm. "We were in three netbook design wins in Q1 and we expect each of them to go into production in the second half of the year", says Beyer.
So netbooks may be on-track to become a bigger market than notebooks, but will netbooks replace notebooks?
"I would love to have that kind of device but not to use it instead of a laptop", replies Beyer, "when I bring a laptop home at weekends and do serious work, I need a laptop. For evenings I could just bring a small netbook home to check emails, etc."
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