Do take that “up to 300%” figure with a large helping of salt, though. The 300% figure comes from a program called povray, with renders a 3D scene using ray tracing, and it uses *only* floating point math for doing this. So the more a program uses floating point operations, the faster it will be with this particular software optimization. The thing is that ARM is fairly poor in floating point operations compared to Intel in the first place, that’s why we use a GPU to do floating point heavy graphics operations, and not the CPU, and it makes this particular improvement less useful. Not that it isn’t useful, but the performance increase that you will feel as a user is far from 300%.

Here are some other benchmarks (showing ~20-30% in single programs): http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1821&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

They’re also working on software API optimizations.  So if you use their version of linux then you can see performance boost of up to a claimed 300%.

Combined with the expected lower price when they introduce the new board should make their offering quite interesting.

Also, remember that overall system performance is affected by a lot more than just the CPU. If the same memory controller, for example, is in an A9 and an A8, this might be the bottleneck in the system, and the A9 would still feel as slow as the A8. Also, the disk drive is often the bottleneck, and Freescale are the only ones who have an integrated SATA controller on their boards, to enable SSDs to be connected to them.

So while a faster CPU is going to make a difference, 2 A9′s won’t necessarily be two times as fast as an A8. The whole system (memory, disk – and software too) must be taken into account as well.

I know I’m looking forward to the new Genesi netbook. Also, as far as I know they are the only one who offer a $199 ARM based netbook at the moment.

I can’t wait for a laptop with a Cortex A9 quadcore or a Cortex A15 dualcore.