This is a fascinating article both in what it says, and what it doesn't say. If the future is really low powered SoC's then Intel is in a world of hurt. The reason for that is that if Intel can only match power/performance of ARM in their chips, then its a toss up for the manufacturer in terms of user visible impact on which to use, and that makes cost and/or differentiation the next selector in the 'whose do we buy' tree.

If Intel has to go to the mat on price it really kills their business model. One of the amazing things about Intel over the last 20 years has been that their part sells for up to 30% of the total cost of all parts of the system. And what that means is that if you get the CPU for half as much you save 15% on your total parts cost. That is huge savings. But if Intel has to cut their margins to get sales, they lose a lot of R&D dollars and their legendary advantage in Fabrication is suddenly underfunded. That is a huge problem for them. Intel has to win this fight or they will have to radically change the way they have structured their business.

The second part is differentiation. Intel just doesn't license the x86 architecture any more, they got out of that when competitors were out executing them in architecture design. What that means is that you really can't add an instruction if you're an Apple or a Cisco or what not to your CPU to make your particular use of the part more efficient. But with ARM you can. If you are an instruction set licensee you can make internal changes and keep the compatibility high. Apple just demonstrated with the A5x that this was something they were willing to do. There is no relationship with Intel where that sort of option would be possible.

So if Intel can only match ARM on its performance and power curves, they lose. They have to be either 50% faster at the same power levels on the same workload, or 50% more efficient at the same performance. +/- 10% or so isn't going to cut it when they are commanding a huge chunk of the parts cost.