My take here is not about magic ARM dust. I do remember the magic RISC dust days -- and I, as a lover of the elegant -- was on the losing side of that one. I th

My take here is not about magic ARM dust. I do remember the magic RISC dust days -- and I, as a lover of the elegant -- was on the losing side of that one. I think the basic threat to Intel and x86 is this: - Intel operates as a high-margin business. Their CPUs aren't $10 components, and they don't really have any serious competition. The whole point of the word "Wintel" was that all the value in a PC was going to Microsoft (for the OS) and Intel (for the CPU). These mobile ARM chips aren't like that at all. They're just another component in the device, like the camera and the display. - Scale. Ben Evans makes the case well here: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/11/7/mobile-ecosystems-and-the-death-of-pcs http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/11/7/mobile-ecosyste... . He writes: "And fourth, the broader scale advantage - the ARM/iOS/Android ecosystem is moving towards selling 10x more devices each year than the Wintel ecosystem. That's a similar disparity to that between PowerPC/Mac and Wintel 20 years ago." I realize too that running a benchmark like GeekBench on iOS is not apples-to-apples running it on Mac OS X. But even if it's not the case that the iPad Pro is a faster computer than a MacBook, it's close. But I really do think it's faster -- it shows in browser-based benchmarks, which I think are a fair comparison even across iOS and OS X. But in short: Intel doesn't want to (and possibly can't) compete on price, and they can't compete on scale. Neither of those things are magic.