No it doesn't explain intel getting crushed on mobile, that is more a question of focus. You have to remember than those "big" decoders can be scaled down to a

No it doesn't explain intel getting crushed on mobile, that is more a question of focus. You have to remember than those "big" decoders can be scaled down to a few thousand transistors as is seen on something like the 486 if you willing to pay the performance penalty. The entire 486 was something like 1M transistors (including cache/mmu/fpu/etc/etc). Which makes it smaller than pretty much every modern design that can run a full blown OS like linux. When you look at things like a modern x86 with dual 512bit vector units, what you see are things consuming power that frequently don't exist on the smaller designs (like that vector unit, a modern arm might have a dual issue 128 bit NEON unit). Here is a cute graphic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moore%27s_Law_Transistor_Count_1971-2018.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moore%27s_Law_Transistor_...