Analyst: ARM Powered Netbooks to Take 55 Percent of Market by 2012

Intel’s Atom processor has some fierce competition coming from ARM, if you believe Information Network President Robert Castellano. According to the EE Times, Castellano says that ARM based processors will hold 55 percent of the netbook market by 2012.

While Intel’s Atom processor will amount for 80 percent of the market share of the 21.5 million netbooks expected to be sold in 2009, ARM based netbooks will surge with developments from Internet applications and Linux, says the article.

“We see two technology factors converging with the poor macroeconomic situation that will create a market for ARM—the release of the Cortex-9 microarchitecture and the emergence of cloud computing,” Castellano said in prepared statement.

Qualcomm, Freescale and Texas Instruments are all prepping ARM-based processors for the netbook category and expect to release products to market in the second half of the year. Each of them plan to offer Linux netbooks as the architecture is not designed for Windows operating systems.

But can netbooks that cannot run Windows operating systems take 55 percent of the market? It was for this reason that IDC predicts that ARM-based processors would only be able to snatch 10-20 percent of the market.