Whereas many among the unwashed masses have heard the term "Intel Inside" when referring to their computers, fewer are aware of what nestles deep within their mobile phones, but Morris hopes ARM will soon change that.
"Everyone wants to go mobile. People are expecting they're always going to be connected," said Morris, adding that with multi-core capabilities coming soon to both ARM and Qualcomm, an 'always on', 'full-day use' model of mobile computing would deliver more than enough compute capability for the businessperson on the go.
Morris told us that ARM has a large number of netbook design wins underway from major OEMs in Taiwan, some of which may be announced as early as July. Most will be unveiled around August and September, just in time for the back-to-school crowd and, after that, the Christmas shopping frenzy. There will also purportedly be "a bunch after that" too, according to Morris.
ARM, Morris said, would be looking to exploit the plethora of new operating systems and User Interfaces (UI) cropping up for little laptops of late, including Google's Android and Xandros Linux. Of course Intel hasn't exactly been laying back on its laurels either, with the firm chipping away at its own Open Source Moblin Linux project for MIDs and mobile devices.
Intel, however, has the disadvantage of having to scale its chips and power down, while, for fabless ARM, the only way is up, and that includes prices and all important margins. Morris noted, however, that the spiralling of netbook prices was forcing OEMs to take a different look at how to make good profits from netbooks, to make the little lappies worth their while. This, said Morris, would likely be achieved via the "Printer/Ink" model.
Printers, explained Morris, were an "amazing piece of technology," sold for a pittance because firms make all their money on selling the ink to go with them. That is where the punter gets well and truly fleeced. Morris told us OEMS were now eyeing up the same strategy for netbooks, aiming for a more "storefront typeview" aimed at securing customer "allegiance".
What about hybrid ARM/Intel machines? we asked Morris. After all, Dell recently launched just such a device, dubbed "On Tech", for a couple of its Latitude machines - targeted specifically at business users who need near constant access to their emails and online calendars. Morris agreed that there did seem to be "a number of companies doing that design," but added the devices ARM had in the pipeline worked just fine on just its own chips.