ARM CEO Warren East believes the company's chips could eventually power the majority of netbooks, despite the fact that they cannot run desktop versions of Windows.

In an interview with PCPro, East said ARM's market share would see a dramatic increase once performance reaches new levels and that it could soon become the dominant architecture in netbooks.

"Although netbooks are small today – maybe 10% of the PC market at most – we believe over the next several years that could completely change around and that could be 90% of the PC market," said East. In other words, ARM could me the dominant processor supplier in the PC market, but only if East's optimistic predictions materialize.

ARM faces an uphill struggle against Intel, as its chips lack x86 support. Hence, they are unable to run desktop Windows, and Microsoft won't change this anytime soon.

“What’s holding it back is people’s love of the Microsoft operating system and that fact that it’s familiar and so on. But actually the trajectory of progress in the Linux world is very, very impressive. I think it’s only a matter of time for ARM to gain market share with or without Microsoft," said East, adding that there are no technical barriers to making desktop versions of Windows run on ARM chips.

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