Re: Power consumption of the system?
The Intel-based Motorola has similar power/performance figures to ARM-based phones. It has better single-threaded performance, worse graphics and worse task switching but would feel as good to a user: on a phone screen and radio use are also big power draws.
Intel still has three problems: it is still playing catch up in the lower power game so while Silvermont has been announced, the S4 already has big.Little on the shelves; ARM manufacturers are catching up in process technology which is driven by volumes; Intel still wants to charge a lot more for chips than competition-constrained ARM vendors. It will obviously offer sweeteners such as marketing subsidies to any manufacturers to effectively lower the price per chip. But, as the continuing dearth of volume Atom-based phones would seem to indicate, it has yet to achieve volume.
I think that beefing up the architecture may be a gamble now that the phone market seems lost. This could easily hit revenues if computer and server manufacturers reckon they can do the same work with Atoms that they have been thinking about doing with ARMs because it will cannibalise sales of even beefier but much higher margin chips. There may also be reasonably large market in Windows Pro tablets, now that RT is effectively dead and the Start button is coming back, as drop in replacements for notebooks which are now standard business issue.
I'm not a pundit but I think we can expect the next earnings call to factor in lower margins, in a similar way that the lower margin sales of the I-Pad Mini have hit Apple's business.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
