So basically your argument is “Intel’s vaporware can beat up ARM’s vaporware”?
That’s going to be an enlightening argument…
There are two issues that matter here, the rest is crap.
(a) Can Intel respin CPUs as fast as ARM? This is not obvious.
Look at how long it took Intel, the most experienced CPU design company in the world, to get from Atom 1.0 to Silvermont.
Compare that to the 2 yrs or so it took Apple to get from nowhere to a competitive product in Swift.
The problem Intel faces is an x86 tax not on power or on area but on complexity.
Which leads us to
(b) Intel has a business problem on its hands. Yes, Haswell is an amazing product, as were Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge and Nehalem and so on beforehand. But Haswell costs around $250 to a LOT higher, depending on the exact model. That $250+/chip is what’s paying for 7 parallel design teams working to design its successor (it takes 7 years or so for an Intel CPU to go from initial conception to release).
Can Intel afford to run 7 teams in parallel to get annual updates to Atom of the same sort of caliber? Can they afford to do so while selling their CPUs at ARM level prices (which are what, $20?, at the high end)?
And every time Intel improves Atom, they’ll have people in the desktop division telling them they’re trading a $250 sale for a $20 sale.
Intel made a major business cockup in going with x86 for low power rather than ARM. If they’d gone with ARM, they wouldn’t have the problem of cannibalizing their high end; now they do have that problem and are going to be in a constant state of internal civil war for the next ten years or so.
