Warren East, CEO of ARM, told Bloomberg today that he expects to see ARM cores in six million computers in 2010.
East said he has a target of getting into one in five Netbooks sold next year and that he believes the Netbook market, in unit terms, will amount to 30m devices in 2010.
Asked by Electronics Weekly in April if he was expecting about ten Netbook designs to be built using ARM cores this year, East replied: "Something of that order."
Asked if Linux could do as good a job in a Netbook as Microsoft XP, East replied: "Today the Linux world is not as good as Microsoft from the point of view of the user, but it's getting rapidly better."
"So it will get to be as good as Microsoft and, when that happens, the genie will be out of the bottle. Because Linux is much more cost-effective than Microsoft, people will ask: 'Why do we use Microsoft?'," added East.
ARM is saying that the new ARM processors, Cortex A8 and the four core Cortex A9, which will be used in the Netbooks coming out this year, will be able to deliver a "desktop-class user experience" while using ten times less power than Intel's Atom.
ARM shares have risen 24 per cent this year, but CFO Tim Score is not being particularly optimistic merely saying that "things will probably get a bit better, but we're not relying on anything dramatic," in an interview with Dow Jones newswires.
See also: Electronics Weekly's Focus on Linux, a roundup of content related to the open source operating system shaped for industrial uses.