>The energy footprint of those processors has shrunken considerably in the same time, which is a huge improvement for portables. Yes and no. The Westermere, Sa

>The energy footprint of those processors has shrunken considerably in the same time, which is a huge improvement for portables. Yes and no. The Westermere, Sandybridge, Ivybridge, Haskell, Devil Cannon's line isn't really targeted for the mobile market. The shinking power budget is caused by 2 things. 1) To stay competitive against 64bit ARM processors. Intel processors are barely used in mobile devices. But eventually ARM will attempt to transition into laptop/desktop/server and compete with Intel directly, this is where lower power comes into play. 2) Feature set. New features (functionality) on chip cost not just dye space, but cost power and heat. The heat and power are the far most critical issues. If your interested in a slightly satirical look at modern hardware scaling I suggest you read The Slow Winter http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/theslowwinter.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/theslowwi...