I’m also interested in seeing what the initial price of the new Smartbook will be. I doubt it will be lower than $199, maybe more initially, but we’ll see.

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

If they targeted developping countries, they would have put an ethernet port.
Also the Hercules E-cafe is competing in the same league.

Well, they may be the only one offering ARM based netbooks that don’t suck for $199.  A year ago they were actually going for $300 but that was a year ago and pricing for A8 solutions are way down now and they did an amazing job reducing cost on the new i.MX53 board they’re producing.

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.

I’m using a Core 2 Quad in my current PC. To say that an A8 is necessarily obsolete because the A9 exists, is like saying this PC became useless as soon as the Core i-series were released.
To me, if this netbook feels fast enough, is responsive enough, I don’t care if an A9 exists. We’ll see how fast it is when it gets out (and I go buy one :))

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.

some constructor have Cortex A9 quadcore…. some tablet will use this kind of procesor before the end of the year….. so a laptop with a Cortex A8 is a little obsolete….

¿ Cortex18 ?, actual tablets usually use a Cortex A9 dualcore.

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

yep a Bit late compared to existing Cortex18 tablets , but a good point for a linux SMartbook