slacker (s@lack.er) on 9/17/09 wrote:
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>It seems to me that the netbook industry is based on:
>
>i) People who want a secondary, ultra-portable laptop. One which slides in to their
>backpack for general-purpose needs while on-the-go.
>
>ii) People who just don't want to pay for a full-fledged laptop.
>
>Both parties want to run Windows. It's not as though linux wasn't presented as
>an option to the consumers. Netbooks debuted with linux, and now everything is back to the Redmond hegemony.

Any of MacOS, Linux, WinCE would be fine. I don't need Windows (although it would be nice) - all I need is a browser, email, word/powerpoint/excel equivalents, compilers and I'm happy. What I do need is a full day battery life and decent performance.

>Furthermore, isn't this chip going to be late to the netbook game? Intel has already
>made a land-grab in this market, and they'll be pushing 32nm Atom chips in 2011.
>Qualcomm already has 1GHz ARM chips in the form of Snapdragon, and will release
>1.3GHz chips by the end of 2009 (and Microsoft is already trying to knife Snapdragon in the back).

Snapdragon is not the only 1+ GHz ARM around - OMAP4 production is about to start, and that has 1GHz dual core Cortex-A9. Anyway, since the 2GHz version is an optimized version of an existing design, it will be available in products much quicker than a completely new design.

>I think it will be interesting to see where Tegra goes. If Tegra netbooks establish
>any kind of significance in the netbook market, then maybe a dual-core A9 will have a chance for relevance.

The ARM11 Tegra is pretty quick already. Nvidia say the next version (Q2 2010) is 4 times faster, which means it must use the 2GHz Cortex-A9. Another clue is that both use TSMC.

Wilco