>Intel are still ahead in low power mobile CPU race,

I never met a person with a smart phone that uses an intel chip. They probably exist but i know none.

Apple aren't using them. Samsung aren't.. HTC nope.. Google pixel nope...

Intel basically sold off/scuttled their mobile division right before the iphone took off.

I think it's referring to laptops. That said I had the ASUS Zenfone 2 and the performance seemed alright, but certain apps didn't work because of the architecture difference, most notably Pokemon Go for the whole time it was popular (although it's probably for the better that I missed that whole craze).

I had a Zenfone 2 for a while too, performance and battery life were both pretty good. Thing was super unreliable though, not sure for what reason.

oh yeah i forgot laptops.

I meant "mobile" as in laptop CPUs, I've edited my post to clarify.

My apologies, you're right about laptops.

FWIW, I owned an ASUS Zen Phone 2 which contained an Atom x86 processor. It worked pretty well. I sold it to a friend of a friend who I think still uses it today. That said, that processor line was discontinued.

I think “mobile” was supposed to refer to laptops, not phones or tablets.

New Snapdragon 845-based Chromebook is on the way.

> It comes as Microsoft continues its work with Qualcomm to optimize Windows for devices powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips, including the forthcoming Snapdragon 850, which Samsung used for its first Arm-based Windows 10 laptop. So it appears there is some momentum behind the concept.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/arm-on-windows-10-chromebooks-...

I think ARM could be a viable contender in the low-power laptop segment, kinda maybe possibly.

However, I used to own a Tegra K1-based Chromebook, and that thing was sl-o-o-o-o-o-o-w, and it only got worse with successive updates. I'm not really optimistic when it comes to performance, absent highly-optimized apps. The state of Firefox and Chrome doesn't really fill me with confidence.

The state of Firefox and Chrome shows more than anything else that the many cores is good thing and especially that RAM size is the king actually. Modern smartphones with 6 and 8 GB of RAM make a difference.

I think Apple laptop CPUs will be like USB-C. First 'what's the point, nothing is compatible', year later 'everyone is doing it and it's actually pretty cool to attach everything including power with a single cheap dongle'.

I wasn't aware we were there with USB-C. I still need a dongle every time I use anything. But more importantly, I was in the camp of "I barely connect anything to my computer other than power, and MagSafe worked so well I forgot it was ever an issue, but then "USB-C charging" regressed things to the point where I thought I was charging but nope, turns out the connector was slightly out and my battery is at 5%".

I think it would take far longer than a year for a critical mass of OS X software to become ARM-compatible, but it could be viable in the long run.

I'd like for ARM laptops to become more popular though, as a Debian user nearly all the software I use is already there.

Apple already got a huge number of developers to transition their apps to 64-bit ARM with the iPhone, I feel like if they made it simple enough they could get a critical mass on the desktop just as quickly.

Not at all, they bungled low power bigly with the atom trainwreck and are so far behind ARM now that they have given up competing.

I don't see very many competitive AMD- or ARM-based laptops around, though.