Last January at CES, Microsoft officially announced that Windows 8 would not only support the X86 processors made by Intel and AMD but also chips designed with the architecture made by ARM. Now an analyst has predicted that Windows 8's ARM support will lead to a new line up of laptops that won't cost much and could be a threat to Intel's notebook dominance.
News.com reports that IHS-iSuppli analyst Matthew Wilkins predicts that shipments of processors with the ARM design will go much higher and will allow ARM-based laptops to have as much as 22.9 percent of the entire laptop market by 2015. That's up from just 3 percent in 2012. He added that while those laptops will also have other operating systems such as Google's Chrome OS he expects most of those laptops will be running on Microsoft's Windows 8 OS. The asking price for those laptops should be fairly cheap too with Wilkins saying the ARM-based notebooks should sell for below $700.
ARM processors from companies like Qualcomm and Nvidia have already been announced and its likely that those chips when they are ready will be put into the ultra-cheap notebook. All of this might spell trouble for Intel who is by far the biggest supplier of laptop processors. A couple of months ago it announced a new notebook concept called the Ultrabook that would combine light and thin laptops with a long battery life for less than $1,000. The first notebooks built with the Ultrabook concept are scheduled to be released later this year.
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