2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 Chip coming to the Linux device near you

Last Wednesday, ARM Ltd announced that their 2GHz version of the Cortex-A9 microprocesor. This 2GHz ARM CPU is aimed at smartbooks and smartphones. The most exciting point to note is that this powerful CPU consumes just 0.5w even while running at its peak.

ARM actually wanted its speedy cortex CPU to battle against the Intel Atom CPU which are used in most of the netbooks. Sadly, Microsoft has no plans to port it to the ARM platform. Call it fortunate or unfortunate, you will be stucked with Linux powered smartbooks. Do not get us wrong. We love Linux, especially Ubuntu, but majority of the people find Windows OS more gratifying.

I feel acutely that Microsoft should consider porting Windows 7 (or atleast Windows XP) to ARM architecture. This would enable manufactures to make phones and ARM-based MIDs run desktop operating systems like Windows XP/7 or even Mac OS X.

Dell not perturbed about their Linux-netbook returns

Few months back, Microsoft said that netbooks running Linux have experienced higher number of netbook returns as compared to the netbooks running Windows OS and most (~96%) of the netbooks in the world run Windows OS . Dell, however thinks that it is not the whole truth. According to the Dell, the number of Linux-netbook returns are same as those for Windows netbooks, atleast for Dell netbooks. In fact, they are quite pleased with the stability and soundness of their Linux netbooks.

Here is the remark made was a Dell official, which is contradictory to many said in the past. Todd Finch, Dell senior product manager, says that ‘this is false, calling it a “non-issue” and that “they are making something of nothing” in response to Microsoft’s claims. He says they see about the same in return rates’.

That said, the demand for Linux netbooks is no-where as Windows netbooks. Reason is pretty simple: people do not much about Linux and their advantages over the Windows-based operating systems. Fortuntaely, Dell has realized this fact and now they are going to be little more aggressive in advertising Linux.

“If you take my marketing budget, add it to Ubuntu and Red Hat’s marketing budget it’s not even a rounding error for Microsoft. For us to generate the market awareness to say: ‘I want Linux on a netbook’ is going to be incredibly hard because we don’t have the tools to do that,” Brockmeier said.