well they can actually run alot of the same benchmarks in linux, which is probably the os that the arm netbooks will be running anyways.

I'm guessing most atom netbooks will continue to run windows.

But atom isn't standing still either, so it should be very interesting, which slow chip will be faster? :-)

IIRC Snapdragon is only licensing the instruction set and is designing their own silicon.

If they can pull off a super long battery life they could be onto a winner.

Yeah, they've really got ARM in their sights, designing a competitor thats based on an ARM design license that they buy off ARM. I'll start my own fast food chain that add's chilli flakes to Big Macs, that'll screw Macca's over.

Has the author actually looked at the architecture of the ARMv7 based Cortex designs from ARM? They are a damn sight more sophisticated than the Atom architecture, and I do think that a dual core ARMv7 based chip at ~1.5GHZ would decimate the Atom processor, if they could run the same benchmarks.

I fail to see how creating an ARM compatible CPU by paying ARM for an architecture license (not cheap!) somehow disadvantages ARM. Especially when their product is going to grow the ARM ecosystem upwards just in time for ARM's ARMv7 Cortex cores to come out.

I'm fairly certain that a dual-core ARMv7 implementation (as Snapdragon is) at 1.5GHz will be pretty darn competitive with Atom performance wise. Single chip. Video decode and encode acceleration. What's not to like? They could sell this chip for $50 and it would be a better deal than the Atom + awful chipset Intel option, and take up 1/5th of the space.