ARM chip makers are competitors to Intel now. Whether you believe it or not, is less important. Intel, however, does believe it. Their entire chip strategy over

ARM chip makers are competitors to Intel now. Whether you believe it or not, is less important. Intel, however, does believe it. Their entire chip strategy over the past few years has been a response to ARM - with each new generation they barely increase the performance of mainstream chips or even drop it, like they did with Core-M, as they try to lower their power consumption, to put them closer to ARM's range. I'm not talking about IPC here, but about the overall performance of the mainstream chips they're pushing in the market. First it was -M chips in laptops (30W-level performance), then it was -U chips (15W-level performance), and now it's -Y chips (5W - or so they say - level performance). Yes, a good chunk of that difference is from moving to new nodes and optimization, but not all of it. Another big part comes from lowering the performance and/or throttling their chips a lot more aggressively than before in order to achieve that drastic drop in power consumption. They don't care what AMD is doing these days, but they do care what ARM chip makers are doing. They even bought a 4G modem company, so they can integrate modems into chips the way Qualcomm does it. Speaking of Qualcomm, I believe it has just announced it's going into server chips now. Intel feels so threatened by ARM now, that it's losing $1 billion per quarter, to essentially give away its Atom chips for free to no-name tablet makers, or less important OEMs (who are the only ones desperate enough to take Intel's deal, because others know that as soon as Intel becomes a big player, they'll charge a much higher rate even than other ARM competition - Intel likes big profits on its chips and it's the only way for them to sustain the company). They even went into the business of IP licensing for crying out loud, just like ARM (they're licensing Atom IP to Rockchip and Spreadtrum). Intel has essentially admitted that it can't be competitive building its own mobile chips. They have to license the IP to others so other companies can build them - on TSMC's foundry, on an old process node, even by current ARM standards.