At present Intel Corp.’s positions of the market of netbooks are very solid and companies like Texas Instruments and Via Technologies are behind the world’s largest chipmaker. However, going forward, ARM vendors, including TI, will pressure Intel as consumers will be looking forward netbooks with longer battery life.

“Today, Intel has key customers shipping products in volume. x86-based solutions allows netbook vendors the flexibility to create one product with the option to run Linux or Windows. However, we expect ARM-based vendors to become more competitive here as netbooks evolve to be much lighter, thinner, and cheaper with longer battery life, and as consumers come to accept Linux OSs more readily,” said ABI Research analyst Philip Solis.

According to ABI Research, Intel presently tops its so-called “netbook platform vendor matrix”, whereas Texas Instruments and Via Technologies claim the second and third spots, respectively.

The vendor mtrix is an analytical tool developed by ABI Research to provide an understanding of vendors’ positions in specific markets. Vendors are assessed on the important parameters of “innovation” and “implementation” across several criteria unique to each vendor matrix.

For this particular matrix, under “innovation”, ABI Research examined the speed with which vendors brought products to market, the flexibility of their solutions or designs, bundling of WWAN, WPAN and/or GPS, the use of x86 or Cortex A-8 (or higher) processors, and the products’ support for 720p HD video.

Under “implementation”, ABI Research scrutinized the following criteria: the vendors’ announced design wins, their experience with CE and mobile device vendors, their experience with PC vendors, whether they support all PC operating systems, and whether they support all lower level operating systems.

The netbook platform vendor matrix is part of a group of vendor matrices for UMDs. The same criteria for platform vendors are used for all three, but the weighting of the criteria is different for each type of UMD.

Tags: Intel, Via Technologies, Texas Instuments