You don’t have to be a technical individual to realize that most netbooks available on the market today take advantage of the Intel ATOM technology. Whether you are getting a N270 netbook or a N280 one, you still know what to expect from your CPU. ARM netbooks are not too mainstream in the U.S. these days, but that doesn’t mean they are not capable of challenging ATOM netbooks. In fact, ARM is planning on changing the game by introducing Cortex A9 2 Ghz. It’s a dual core CPU that will fit into netbooks and take them into the next level.

The new ARM CPU will be much more powerful than its ATOM counterpart, and it won’t fundamentally change the design of future netbooks. The problem is, ARM CPUs are not supported by Microsoft. So you won’t be getting Microsoft Windows on ARM netbooks anytime soon. Most ARM netbooks available on the market today take advantage of Linux OS.

The challenge for ARM is to make it to enough netbooks to stay relevant in this market. Linux is a decent operating system, and while I don’t expect the OS to dominate like Microsoft Windows, it’s still powerful enough to run a netbook effectively. But since you can’t run Windows effectively on ARM machines, the jury is still out on how successful ARM netbooks will be.