You'll notice that Intel isn't coming to Anandtech and offering to break open a bunch of android phones and comparing them with the atom android port. On windo

You'll notice that Intel isn't coming to Anandtech and offering to break open a bunch of android phones and comparing them with the atom android port. On windows Intel is benefitting from a kernel and compiler that's spent 15 years being optimized for their isa. I am sure qualcomm worked very hard with microsoft getting RT out the door but I would wager that there is a lot more room left for optimization of krait on windows rt than there is for atom on windows 8. Intel and Acer also have a lot of experience optimizing for the hard separation between the platform code and the os which typically involves a lot of cheating / second guessing. I'm pretty sure microsoft requires their arm platforms to support the traditional x86 style platform interfaces like uefi and acpi. Arm SOC manufacturers gave traditionally benefitted from being able to do deep integration into the OS and exploit tons of manufacturer specific optimizations. I highly doubt qualcomm enjoyed the same freedom with the NT kernel. So while it's impressive to see atom operating with much better gating than it traditionally has had, I suspect that if you did the comparison on neutral ground using gcc on linux and let all the manufacturers do as much optimizing as they wanted you'd see the arm systems improving their performance per watt significantly. Meanwhile the atom would be lucky to just tread water.