Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Qualcomm and Freescale want to try to force Intel


Apparently, Qualcomm and Freescale really want to take away a large portion of Intel's cake in the form of market Netbook. As you know, in this market segment still dominated by processor Atom, and although the processor giant has financial and technological capabilities, Qualcomm and Freescale are determined to fight it. It should be recalled that at the moment, Intel is the first line in the Scheduled rank the world's semiconductor manufacturers, and Qualcomm on the 8 th place. But it seems that the unequal struggle had no trouble either Qualcomm, nor Freescale.

As expected, Qualcomm, and Freescale will demonstrate its first Netbook at Computex 2009 in June this year. So, this exhibition, visitors will have the opportunity to get acquainted with two of the Netbook Pegatron and Wistron, which are based on Qualcomm Snapdragon platform and Freescale i.MX51. Regarding Snapdragon, this platform is already well known for example, the latest smartphone Toshiba TG01 (pictured), but so far little is known about the platform offered by Freescale. According to preliminary data, it consists of the i.MX51 processor and motherboard ARM Coretex A8.S other hand, NVIDIA is also actively promoting its platform Tegra. Indeed, this is One-solution (System-On-Chip). According to recent data, MSI is already actively engaged in the development of fully functional mobile systems based on the Tegra. By the way, and MSI, and ASUS has recently confirmed that they are exploring the possibility to establish serial production Netbook Snapdragon platform based on Qualcomm.

Thus, in the near future with Atom processors from Intel will be very serious competitors in the form of processors ARM. It may seem strange, but the Atom virtually no competition on the platform of x86, in spite of all efforts on the part of VIA. According to experts from the Information Network, share Netbook ARM-based processors could reach 55% mark by 2012. The point is that the cost of these chips is much cheaper than the Atom, a Netbook based on them will work under Linux, not Windows. On the other hand, other analysts believe that by that time, the proportion Netbook processor-based x86 could be as much 80%. Perhaps only time can tell who is right in this dispute, but in any case, this summer we will see the first Netbook processor-based ARM.