Eight hours between charges for a netbook is the promise of Freescale's ARM-based processor which is a considerable bonus over the commonly quoted three hour battery life for Atom-based netbooks.
Freescale says it can supply a complete chip-set solution for $20 compared to the commonly quoted cost for an Atom-based chip-set of around $60. The Freescale processor supports ordinary DDR2 rather than the five times more expensive mobile version of DDR2.
That gives a market price for a Freescale-based netbook of around $200, compared to a market price for Atom-based netbooks which has crept up to over $400.
Freescale calls its netbook processor the i.MX515. It uses an ARM Cortex-A8 core and made in 65nm process technology, which gives up to 2100 Dhrystone MIPS at speeds up to 1GHz. Advanced power management techniques eliminate the need for fans or heat sinks.
Freescale's processor follows on the announcement, just before Christmas, of an ARM-based processor for netbooks from Qualcomm called SnapDragon 2.
2009 is going to be the year when the Intel vs ARM battle for the netbook market gets going.
A lot is riding on it because, if Intel is successful, then Intel will go after the smartphone processor market which is ARM's core market.
But, if ARM wins in the netbook market, and shows that ARM-based processors can power netbooks satisfactorily, then the door is open for the ARM architecture to move into the laptop arena which is Intel's core market.
The netbook market was only a relatively insignificant affair last year with 15m units sold, according to analysts ABI Research, but this year that is expected to grow to 140m units.
See also: Electronics Weekly's focus on x86 microprocessors, a roundup of content related to x86 microprocessor technologies and developments.
See also: Electronics Weekly's focus on microprocessors, a roundup of content on microprocessor technologies and developments not related to the x86 architecture (from ARM, Texas Instruments and MIPS).
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