Qualcomm said that it its four-year, $350 million effort to design a chip that goes into small notebooks and handhelds will be over next year as planned.

The outfit has been trying to build a processor for netbooks based on the Snapdragon processor. The Snapdragon technology is quite different from Intel's Atom: for a start, it stays on even when it is switched off.

A Qualcomm spokesman said that the laptop goes to your Exchange server, gets your e-mail, puts it on the drive and then when you're ready to do e-mail, you flip it open and it's right there. It is instant on and always connected.

Intel's chip will have eaten all the battery juice in a few days and not run any more, he claimed. The downside is that the chip is a bit slower than the Atom, but is a bit faster than some of the ARM technology out there. ARM designs tend to reach the end of their speed threshold at 500Mhz.  The Atom can manage 1.6GHz.

The Qualcomm QSD8672 dual-core Snapdragon that features two CPU computing cores capable of 1.5GHz performance, and a host of other features includes HSPA+, up to 28Mbps download speeds, 1080p high-definition video, Wi-Fi, mobile TV, and GPS. The graphics core is based on Advanced Micro Devices' ATI unit's technology.

The 45-nanometer processor will be built by Taiwan Semiconductor. Companies including Acer, Asus, and Toshiba have signed up to use Snapdragon, according to Qualcomm.