I think back-compatibility is the problem http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2455703 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2455703 But, truthfully, I haven't loo

I think back-compatibility is the problem http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2455703 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2455703 But, truthfully, I haven't looked at the details of the Atom. It seems to have won the netbook market; but helped enormously by existing x86/windows applications. (sadly, there aren't any ARM netbooks.) These applications don't really run usefully on a smart-phone form-factor (ie. they could run, but without a mouse nor keyboard...) - nor on a tablet.... so this change of UI requires applications to be replaced, which enables a platform to be replaced. This is what Apple and Android and ARM are doing. Maybe Intel engineers could create a killer low-power consumption CPU if they were freed from back-compatibilty; but (1) they lack ARM's decades of experience in the space; (2) they didn't do great with Itanium. To be fair, that's probably partly because they were competing with compatibility with their own x86 design - that's what AMD did; but at the same time, they had lots of purely technical problems with it too. Sorry, I haven't answered your questions, just danced around it with looking at Intel's capabilities. What do you think about their efforts with Atom?