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"But let's get real. The only reason x86 is behind right now is because ARM had been working on low power processors for years, and the chips came up that it was the hot area. Intel isn't sitting on their hands, though, and I have no doubt they'll have some killer solutions in the very near future."

This reads like something from 2007, back when the Atom was almost ready.

When Atom arrived, it simply drew too much power for it to compete with ARM SoCs, and in the intervening years, the ARM chips have been improving more quickly than the Intel chips.

It's been more than 2.5 years since the Atom shipped. When are we going to start seeing the results of Intel's earnest effort?

Atom was created for the netbook market, where the target for low power consumption was significantly higher than it was for smartphones and from that tablets.

How many netbooks shipped with ARM? Atom did what was necessary to win that race, even if it wasn't prepared for the subsequent very low power device explosion. The Atom chips themselves are actually remarkably efficient -- with a TDP down to 0.65W for some models, well in the ARM territory -- but Intel never bothered to make efficient supporting circuitry, while failing to full incorporate it into a SoC.

ARM is improving dramatically because it became a critical field with some low hanging advances that were possible. The pace of innovation is impressive, but it has slowed dramatically in the past year -- recall that the Tegra 2 was demoed over a year ago. Today, the high point of the ARM ecosystem is still the Tegra 2. People today are doing the sort of naive extrapolation that we've seen over and over again.

Intel did bother to make ATOM soc's.

They enabled other companies do an ATOM soc using 3rd party fab. nobody took them on their offer.

At the same time , they did there own SOC's. for example the CE4100 ,which is especially fitted for digital tv's and includes graphics(powervr) + memory controller + dsp + hd decode on chip.

It has took the place of tegra in the boxee box, because the tegra wasn't able to decode high profile H.264 HD streams.pretty disappointing for the tegra after all the hype.

But still , the power consumption is high : 11.2W for the boxee box(it's common for streamers to have half that). but intel claims it hadn't done sleep mode on the ce4100.

Edit: sony will also use the ce4XXX(sodaville) for tv's.

Apparently the Atom SoC (system-on-a-chip) is shipping any day now (early 2011).

Intel also has a 32nm SoC process developed, unlike the cheap taiwan/korean fabs which churn out most ARM-based designs.

"Those platforms got abandoned not out of some strategic affinity to x86 (much less to Intel), but simply because they didn't offer the advantage to be worth the bother."

I disagree. MIPS and Alpha offered significant performance advantages during the 90's.

Even though Windows NT was available on these platforms, very little 3rd party software was provided in Alpha, MIPS or PA RISC compatible binaries. In industries where key applications were available, such as 3d animation, Alpha was quite popular, and the others somewhat so.

Running these applications Alpha offered 2x-3x the performance of anything available from intel, and so compared well on a price/performance basis despite higher cost. If they were ever shipped in volume comparable to the P5 the advantage would have been staggering.

If you read the archives of comp.arch you'll see a general sentiment of how highly regarded the architecture was, including postings by intel's own designers at the time. In fact I'd say the only thing more highly praised there would be the transputer (which was probably 3 decades ahead of its time).

> The only reason x86 is behind right now is because ARM had been working on low power processors for years

That's kind of a big reason though.

Yes intel is a great company. but it has:

1. intel has a certain business model that probably requires some level of monopolistic or quasi-monopolistic control on the market(with 80% profit margins).

2. it's strength is within the x86. maybe x86 can't be competitive with ARM on power/performance ? time would tell.

3. is not perfect. has already failed in the ARM market(sold it's ARM unit) , and probably failed in the GPU .

4. performance: in today's world , where things like memory accesses, cache sizes and multi-core connectivity are very important to performance , intel has some contenders in those areas, for example IBM(CPU+DRAM manufacturing on the same die, optical connectivity), tilera(64 core chip, with claimed better performance then intel at an older process node).

5. performance: it might just be that for consumer parts that require multicore (math intensive apps), a gpu is prefered, and a 4 core cpu is enough.

6.ARM biggest advantage is it's open business model , that leads to a very large cooperative ecosystem both at the hardware and software levels.

And if microsoft is serious about the ARM move, intel has just lost a large part of it's biggest competitive advantage.

So i wouldn't be so sure about intel's bright future.

I knew a senior manager at Intel. The company encourages you use the words 'significant competitive advantage'. Not that ugly 'M' word.

So i wouldn't be so sure about intel's bright future.

I'm not invested in Intel. I wouldn't invest in Intel. I don't know where the market will go. However I'm not so knee-jerkish to instantly discount them.

It is truly remarkable how many prophetic statements of absolute truth we've seen over the year based upon temporary states in the industry.

6.ARM biggest advantage is it's open business model , that leads to a very large cooperative ecosystem both at the hardware and software levels.

Intel used to be one of those businesses. Again, way back in the late 80s ARM and other RISC architectures were seen as, without fail, the imminent successors of the universe. Intel got heavily involved. It didn't pan out, so Intel dumped it.

Show me an Intel device that compares with a 2W ARM cpu.

Some of Intel's Atoms run at 2W or less. A year ago I built an Atom-based nettop whose total power drain is something like 4W.

If true I am impressed, I thought the accompanying chipset pushed the baby Atoms up to ~12w total.

Anyway, the Tegra 2 is <2w for complete SoC including the both cores, nvidia gfx, ram and 1Gb storage.

e.g. http://www.netbooknews.com/4891/nvidia-tegra-2-module-fits-o...

TBH, T2 is from 2009, we know Tegra 3 is done and they are already working on Tegra 4 from an interview with the CEO last year

>I thought the accompanying chipset pushed the baby Atoms up to ~12w total.

This is one of Intel's own motherboards; let me dig it up...D945GCLF.

And I was wrong. The Atom itself has a TDP of 4W. The motherboard claims its total draw is 75W, with hard drive, optical, "and all board peripherals enabled". In practice, I kept it down a lot by installing (a) a laptop hard drive and (b) nothing else. I have a USB optical drive I hook up when I need it.

I should plug it into my Kill-A-Watt tonight and report back--I know I measured it before, but I didn't write down the numbers. I know the idle draw was stupidly low, like under a watt. (That's cheating a little, though, since it means unplugging the dongle for the wireless mouse&keyboard. Even when it's plugged in, it's on a USB hub, which I wasn't measuring.)

Thank you for following up. Much of that will be the rotary drive and unfair to compare to an SSD.

For what it is worth, I do like Intel, my Core 2 Duo is so good it will tide me over until Ivy Bridge (22nm).