Everyone who follows Intel as it makes the case for low-power, ultramobile x86 knows that the company has two code phrases that it employs in varying forms in its pitch: Intel processors support the "full Internet experience," and they support the complete "IA installed base." The first of these (the full Internet experience) is code for "Adobe Flash," and the second (IA installed base) is code for "Windows." However, recent news out of Computex challenges the relevance of both of these pro-x86 arguments.

First up is the joint announcement by Adobe and NVIDIA that Adobe is optimizing Flash to run on Tegra and take advantage of NVIDIA's mobile GPUs. The previously announced Flash port to ARM, along with the related open screen project, had already put Intel on notice that their "full Internet experience" talking point has a very limited shelf life, and the fact that Adobe is optimizing for GPU acceleration on Tegra further seals its fate.

But the Flash announcement isn't all roses for NVIDIA. Flash probably needs to be optimized for GPU acceleration, given that Tegra's ARM11 core looks pretty weak compared to Atom for regular, general-purpose workloads (this includes browsing Flash-enabled sites). This weakness also means that, while Tegra can be put into a netbook, it's not quite ideal, and even with the GPU optimization Atom-based netbooks may still boast a better Flash experience than the Tegra-based competition.

ARM/Android vs. Wintel in the netbook market

Also coming out of COMPUTEX this year is a growing chorus of buzz around Android as a netbook OS, buzz that's mostly stoked by Qualcomm's display of a very thin, Snapdragon-based ASUS EeePC prototype running android, and by Acer's announcement that it will release an Android-based netbook (allegedly based on Atom) in the third quarter of this year. It seems likely that a number of vendors will be jumping on the Android/netbook bandwagon, and if that happens, this will almost certainly eat into Windows XP's netbook marketshare. By extension, this would weaken the usefulness of the "it runs Windows" part of Intel's case for Atom. But that doesn't mean that Atom's netbook appeal is eliminated entirely.

I pointed out above that Tegra doesn't look so hot vs. Atom as a general-purpose computing processor, and I suspect this is true of Snapdragon as well (though I can't find a block diagram of the latter's core). ARM's Cortex A9 will be a different story altogether, and will compete directly with Atom in raw performance on general-purpose code. But until A9 comes out, ARM-based netbook makers are going to be forced to run OSes designed to maximize the scarce execution resources of mobile phones.

This is why Android is being floated as a netbook OS, despite the fact that, as we previously�explained in some detail, it's pretty unsuited for this purpose. But if Android netbooks (or "smartbooks," as the ARM coalition is calling them) gain traction with users as a bare-bones, all-day-battery-life alternative to Windows/Atom-based netbooks, OEMs can later transition to a more robust distro like Ubuntu, which will eventually run Android apps, and which has an ARM port.

As I said in the previous article on Tegra, Intel's Atom and its successors will remain the hardware of choice for the very sizable number of people who need a low-cost Windows netbook. But for everyone who doesn't need to run Windows, or for customers in developing countries who don't want to pay the Microsoft tax, Flash-enabled, ARM may be the netbook CPU architecture of choice.