There has been quite alot of interest surroundly ARM lately, personally because I am in the process of looking for a job with them, but thats besides the point. In a field heavily treaded by intel, the semiconductor IP licensing company has come up with a processor that powers the latest lenovo skylight “smart book”. I took a peek at this device at CES (on the web ofcourse!) and I was utterly fascinated by its design.

With an ARM processor in an estimated 98 percent of the over billion phones sold worldwide, the architecture used the mobile communications revolution to quietly gain a competitive position in total processing units worldwide.

Now ARM-based CPUs are preparing to storm the shores of the x86 architecture’s most heavily fortified stronghold — the personal computer.  There’s a multitude of released or pending ARM-based entries, including the Freescale’s i.MX, Marvell (formerly Intel) XScale, NVIDIA’s Tegra, ST-Ericsson Nomadik, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, and the Texas Instruments OMAP product line.

Why are ARM platforms so promising?  Their mobile heritage has helped them develop ultra-low power envelopes.  Where as a Intel Atom N270 (the leading x86 netbook chip) plus 945GSM chipset has a TDP of 11.8 watts, the majority of current ARM system-on-a-chips (SOCs) consume under 2 watts at full load! This means that you truely get a full days worth of charge on your netbook, and the best part of it all is, you do not need to switch off the machine, the designers believe that it should be as personal as a mobile phone and there should be no reason to switch it off then turn it back on 10min later just to continue surfing or listening to music.

Set to lay the smackdown on Atom-based designs, the netbook features the Snapdragon 1 GHz chipset.  It boasts a 10 hour battery life, on par with the current best Atom-based netbooks (the current-gen. Asus Eee PC).  It also features an attractive high defination 10.1″ screen (exact resolution not yet specified).  The weight will reportedly be under 2 lb., quite nice when compared to “hefty” 2.8 lb. that the latest Eee PCs weigh in at.

The netbook also features a gadget interface for speedy and painless access to favorites like Gmail or Facebook.  It comes with integrated 3G and Wi-Fi, which are built into the Snapdragon chipset.

The 1 GHz Snapdragon is just a taste of the ARM goodness that’s to come, though.  There’s incoming ARM dual-core designs, including 1.5 GHz Snapdragon 45 nm variant, that reportedly use 0.5 watts or less (versus 8 watts on the comparable Intel Atom 330).  The aforementioned designs from other vendors are also expected to soon be competing against x86 designs in the netbook sector.