I always wondered about that, but I think that part of the problem with XScale is that it ended up being so far behind. When Intel acquired XScale from DEC, the

I always wondered about that, but I think that part of the problem with XScale is that it ended up being so far behind. When Intel acquired XScale from DEC, they really only got the IP, not the people... so they had to waste a lot of time assembling teams and re-building expertise, by which time the rest of the industry had left them in the dust. Atom is a decent first step toward that niche, but I'm still not convinced about the value of x86 in mobile computing either.