> What if there's an upper limit in performance, where gains get smaller and smaller with each generation? What if Intel is already hitting that ceiling and ARM

> What if there's an upper limit in performance, where gains get smaller and smaller with each generation? What if Intel is already hitting that ceiling and ARM isn't? What if in the next few years this will help ARM catch-up with Intel, while still having its chips cost much less? That would be a problem for Intel, no? There's no polite way to put this, but you don't know much about the problem domain so speculating like this is entirely a waste of time. The problem isn't the fairly minute differences between ARM and x86, the problem is that your transistor budget (and thus power budget) is largely spent trying to keep alive the myth that there exists a single thread of execution and that one instruction executes until it's done and that's when the next one starts. I say that there are minor differences between x86 and ARM because compared to something like the Mill or a grid processor out of UT Austin (your data pipeline was physically routed between functional units on the die by a reconfigurable fabric) the differences seem minor. They both have the same underlying microcodes, the x86 front-end is just more complicated in some ways and simpler in others.