The problem is Intel has already lost on the performance side. Intel has always needed 3 things to beat ARM, and they need all 3 to be competitive: performance, energy efficiency, price.

With Atom, they've always had the performance advantage. In fact they've had a big advantage over ARM at the time when when Atom came out. It was like several times more powerful than the ARM chip inside iPhone 3G.

But to be competitive, Intel needed to compete on the other 2 levels, as well. So they kept Atom's performance mostly the same, while they tried over the years to push Atom down from a 10W TDP. But while Intel tried to lower the power consumption, ARM's chips were gaining in performance - faster than Intel. So now when Intel has finally reached parity with ARM in energy efficiency, ARM has surpassed it in performance with Cortex A15, and from what I've seen so far, by a lot.

Then there's also the pricing issue. I think they've improved there quite a bit. An Atom chip used to be close to $100. Now it's probably more like $40-$50 (this dual core version). But that's still like at least 50% more than an ARM chip.

So Intel still has a lot of catching up to do in "overall competitiveness", because right now it looks like they've only switched the much bigger performance leadership for "energy efficiency parity", and are losing at the other two. I'd like to see how high they are willing to go with Atom on performance, until they realize that it's going to cannibalize their Core i3 market.