The two worlds occupy different regions of the price/performance/power cube.

https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/221881-apples-a9x-goes-he...

http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/16/12939310/iphone-7-a10-fusi...

EDIT: And here's a demo by Microsoft for how Windows 10 would run on the Qualcomm chip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_GlGglbu1U&feature=youtu.be

Intel doesn't seem to have it in their DNA to really focus on mobile across the board. They excel on process (Si node), no question. They have the highest performance CPUs with lots of superscalar, speculative, and multicore performance, and a lot of work going into internal bus architecture. If you don't care about power consumption they seem to be pretty much the only game in town.

And even on laptops, they have the rest of the infrastructure (advanced IO controllers etc) where ARM still noticeably lags. The numbers you cited were mobile chipsets vs the A9. Intel more than held its own, and these didn't get into multicore performance where most of the ARMs' performance rolls off dramatically. Yes, even Apple's. Those Intel mobile chips, much as I hate them, are more general case (see below).

And of course these days most of us care about power (not enough in the datacenter, but that day is coming soon as well). On that front ARM is great. But as I noticed above they don't get the multicore advantage Intel does. Now that doesn't matter as much on a tablet since you actually want to spend as little power energizing silicon as possible. Look at the asymmetry of the A9: a huge amount of the area goes to servicing graphics (kind of the weird descendent of the Alto in this way), less on dealing with multicore bus contention. Which is what you want on a tablet! But it's less useful when, say, you're running a CAD app.

And other design houses have found other points in the space: Q'comm is the only other performance leader in ARM (mediatek etc are going for lower power/fast design) and qcomm parts are notoriously power hungry too (oops). Apple is the only one who has high performance and good power consumption -- but for an execution mix that they control closely, not for the general case!

Interestingly NVIDIA suffers from the same thing, but has managed to cleverly switch into a parallel track (ML with GPGPUs) which is currently also power consumption insensitive and can pay not just a higher W for performance but $ too.

I can't wait for the day to arrive, but no, I don't believe that day is yet nigh.

PS: this post reflects some work I did specifically in this area, unfortunately proprietary to the organization who paid for it.

I'm not convinced this is Intel's fault.

It's anecdotal, but I do web browsing every day on a cheap, consumer-level HP laptop from 2007 with a Core 2 Duo, 2 GB of RAM and a big dumb mechanical HDD. I hardly ever hear the fan. Using Debian with XFCE and few unnecessary background processes.

This is with Safari though which easily has the best UI performance out of all the browsers.

A complete reinstallation of the OS via a USB installer seemed to mostly solve the issues somewhat, seemingly making the crashes mostly stop and the heat/fan profile more "normal" (just stumbled upon this). I guess I suspect ACPI weirdness...

The performance looks surprisingly good...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_GlGglbu1U

The future of Intel / AMD is definitely going to be very interesting to say the least.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_GlGglbu1U

And Acorn (the company that invented ARM chips - Acorn Risc Machine) had the Acorn A4 http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/22807/Acorn-A4-Laptop... Edit: Microsoft was also already there with their Windows CE devices.

And Psion and Vtech (http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/30249/Vtech-I-T-Lapto...) also used ARM Chips in laptop form factor devices

So it's not really about someone beating someone else to market, just the evolution of the market itself.

http://gadgets.ndtv.com/laptops/news/macbook-pro-2016s-touch...

And speaking of windows 10 on arm... what's the deal with this Windows 10 IoT Core thing? from February and how does it relate to the qcom socs?

https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/02/29/windows-10...

Also, I am curious what types of devices we can expect. Something along the lines of a Raspberry Pi, but with more RAM and an SSD would be very nice!

Word, Excel, Outlook, Access etc...

The cut down versions which are currently on Android and iOS doesn't cover all the use cases like the full versions do.

Also having Visual Studio on phone would be interesting :)

The screen on a phone is simply too small, even with a keyboard. The stripped down versions aren't just stripped down because of the slower processors; your fingers are too big to be able to select all the features. Instead the portable apps let you make minor fixes in the field. I have fixed a typo on a powerpoint via my phone, but I would never want to try to do any, say, spreadsheeting on a phone, even with a BT keyboard.

A tablet, well, I still doubt it but I can imagine being wrong: perhaps it's a tablet game changer. We'll see.

The reason I think Microsoft won't make that mistake again is that they already tried it, both ways (full-ish apps on windows phones, and a phone interface, metro, on the PC). Both bombed, and though I'm not sure Nadella really does know what he's doing, I do know he knows that repeating that would be a mistake.

...Now one that runs full desktop software.

Imagine being able to carry everything you need on your phone, and hook it up to any workstation or kiosk to continue working. Less security risks, because all the data is on your device, not anyone else's PCs or networks. And while the UI might not always be the best possible, hopefully you can use it straight from the phone in a pinch as well.

I would love to be wrong. I simply don't believe it's here yet.

In addition I don't know if people really want the continuum experience rather than carrying their screen around with them. It's been tried before, but maybe those previous attempts failed due to wimpy processors.

Now if only I didn't have to bring a billion cables and a keyboard with me

Take "hybrid" tablets that can turn their screen around and whatnot. Who actually uses them like that in any significant amount of time? Nobody, that's who. Most people end up using them in the laptop form factor the vast majority of the time.

As for running the desktop versions of Office or Visual Studio on a 5" screen....well you can imagine all the UX problems with that.

If there's anything ground-breaking here at all (and assuming there isn't a huge performance overhead - should be 10% at most, under 3% ideally), it's the fact that now ARM chip makers will be getting access to the "real" (not counting Chromebooks, where Google never tried to encourage the use of ARM anyway, despite the fact that it's architecture-agnostic, and thus doesn't even need to emulate x86 apps like Windows does) PC/notebook market. That, along with AMD's Zen, should make the PC chip market much more competitive in the next 2-3 years.

That's what should really excite everyone, not some gimmicks that will never be used despite all the hype they may be getting.

I had one of them, Asus Transformer, and used it as a tablet only, despite having a keyboard which served as an additional battery. It was both, worse laptop than real laptop and worse tablet than real tablet. So why purchase it at all, when you are going to use it in single mode? There are better choices on the market.

Seems like a fad, not that they will disappear, but that many current convertibles will migrate back to a more traditional design.

See the Google Cache here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:VM98Uf7...