[citation][nom]JeanLuc[/nom]I can't wait to see ARM in the more traditional x86 market. It will hopefully give Intel and AMD a kick up the backside and come up with some innovative products.[/citation]
Contrary to all the hype, ARM has no chance of displacing more than a negligible percentage of the x86's market. A lot of observers fail to recognize that as with anything else engineered, there's more than a single determining factor. And whenever someone engineers a piece of hardware to be good at one thing, they have to trade off another quality. Often, this also involves specialization: limiting an advantage to just one particular sector.
Low TDP is far from everything. It may be the most critical factor for CPUs for phones and tablets, (and significant in netbooks & ultrabooks) but in desktops, conventional laptops, workstations, and servers, a low TDP is definitely not the #1 concern. Outright performance-per-price (or at least performance-per-CPU) is a bigger concern. In this realm, x86 dwarfs essentially all competitors, across a wide spectrum of platforms; this is the product of both allowing rather high clock speeds, as well as what is generally an unrivaled performance-per-clock; both real-world and synthetic benchmarks show that ARM consistently places behind even Intel's Atom CPU in PPC; and in turn, the Atom is by far the worst x86 CPU currently made in that respect, with most Phenom, Core, and even Bulldozer CPUs averaging the range of up to quadruple the PPC, particularly in the floating-point operations that are increasingly more critical than integer. (where the difference is closer to merely double)
Another factor I hinted at there is scalability: this is where we see Intel and AMD having some problems in trying to push into ARM's market. This difficulty is NOT any sign of any general superiority of ARM over x86, but rather, that ARM is superior at working at very low TDPs, and hence why we only see Atom and Bobcat typically competing only down to the 5-10w range. This is double-edged: performance-wise, we're seeing that ARM can't scale up very well at all; the fastest CPUs I've seen announced from them only hit 2.0 GHz, which doesn't quite compare to a modern 1.0 GHz x86 (non-Atom) CPU, which means that the WEAKEST non-Atom CPUs Intel and AMD are putting out for general consumer sales is more powerful than the most potent ARM CPU around.
You could make a pretty safe bet that one couldn't just clock ARM faster to compensate: it'd have to reach speeds past 6.0 GHz just to compete with the lowest-end CPUs found in laptops, which are, from Intel, running at TDPs of the neighborhood of 17w for two-core chips. Already, that puts the per-clock performance of core i7 close to that of ARM. And ARM's TDP does not evenly scale with TDP: each extra 100 MHz requires more wattage than the previous increment: even if an ARM Cortex COULD be scaled up to such multi-gigahertz speed, its TDP would definitely cease to be impressively low; it would likely go into the 40w+ range, which would simply not cut it; on a performance-per-watt figure, it wouldn't match up with *ANY* x86 CPUs: it'd have no place in laptops, desktops, or servers.
That's why ARM remains where it is: for phones and tablets, the performance expected and required isn't remotely near what it is for even normal laptops. However, it's just fine for such ultra-portable gadgets. By the same token, existing x86 CPUs can fulfill the needs for PCs just fine, but don't scale down too well. In other words, the day ARM replaces x86 on desktops is the day people stop using desktops: since why would you want the weaker power of an iOS or Android device with the bulkiness of a PC?
[citation][nom]KardisF1[/nom]I do believe that only Intel and AMD hold x86 licenses,[/citation]
Actually, VIA does as well; they acquired it, I believe, through their purchase of Cyrix, the only other remaining manufacturer of x86 CPUs.
[citation][nom]Zingam[/nom]And when these companies start producing ARM CPU "good enough" for general use in laptops and desktops, Intel will become irrelevant.[/citation]
Thinking ARM would replace x86 is like thinking the Toyota Prius would replace all cars, vans, and trucks just because it has better mileage. As I mentioned above, ARM can't give you the power for serious gaming. It can't even yet quite match a gaming console.
To put it another way... Why would you want something with the power of an antiquated Pentium 4 for your desktop, even if it does offer a lower TDP? And even for the non-enthusiast audience, why would you want such a desktop, when you could get comparable performance out of a smaller, more sleek phone, tablet, or ultrabook?
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