I completely agree with performance per watt Intel is on the path to be where they need to be but ARM is on path to be par with a chip that even AMD's x86 offer

I completely agree with performance per watt Intel is on the path to be where they need to be but ARM is on path to be par with a chip that even AMD's x86 offerings can't touch on a core by core basis. Now with Microsoft's Windows 8 trying it's very best to be a tablet experience it seems by sales figures people much rather prefer an Android or Apple tablet compared to even i5/A10 laptops with Windows 8. The technicalities you present are right on the money but what we have here is a perfect storm. Microsoft wants to be a tablet OS manufacturer and is skirting the traditional desktop/laptop experience leaving Intel with no real face value to their contribution. When people go to their local stores and see rows of tablets that look like tablets and rows of laptops that look like tablets and rows of desktops that look like tablets, well they just seem to get actual tablets. Sure an Intel i3 will handily beat out the upper echelon of ARM offerings but with Android and IOS be entirely optimized for this experience we are finally realizing what AMD fans have been shouting for decades, the extra horsepower really does not come into effect often enough to make it a deal breaker. Your web page may load 40% slower on an ARM rig but when the Intel model will load it in 1.5s and you tablet will load it in 2s we now experience the Law of Diminishing Returns. If a dual core ARM A15 can consistently run at around 40-50% of the speed of an i3 mobile processor, a quad core ARM should settle at around 60-75% while being tasked to do much, much less. With Intel and ARM you are also dealing with 2 very different ecosystems. x86 has had to be fast because most of the applications you will run on a daily basis are likely not really optimized, profiled or threaded anything above a couple compiler switches. They have to be fast because the code is so slow. Now with Android and IOS the language, libraries and sand-boxing improves the underlying mechanisms to the degree that most of the code that matters is optimized by Apple and Google where the equivalent Microsoft Windows libraries are not as optimized and in many cases so specialized that it gives a look and feel of a Wordpad type app rather than what you are really after. Basically I feel by looking strictly at Intel's raw performance as to the reason why a platform will succeed is improper and an unfair comparison. People are moving en-mass to tablet and smart phone ecosystems not because they are faster or run by a particular processor but because it feels like a custom solution and the integration overall is acceptable. So I don't think it is ARM v Intel but rather tablet v notebook and laptop. If Microsoft keeps up with making their desktop OS look and feel like a tablet OS people buy tablets and Windows 8 doesn't have the applications, word of mouth or market penetration to make that possible right now. If things don't change and quick we may just have a Microsoft and Intel "Double clutch" "Double clutch: this is where a non-swimmer ends up in deep water and, out of panic, grabs the closest person to them to stay afloat." http://www.firstaid-cpr.net/lifeguarding/minor_major.html http://www.firstaid-cpr.net/lifeguarding/minor_major.html