I think ARM is going to continue to bite into x86 market share significantly.
But this article is wrong to right off x86 so easily.
Firstly, power consumption. It's right that ARM has lower power draw than x86. The article is wrong by how much, though. Very low power ARM chips draw much, much less than 2-3 watts. These are mostly for embedded systems, though.
The 2-3 watts vs 5 watts for ARM vs Atom isn't too significant. The big problem with Atom was that the support systems (memory controller etc) draw ~20 watts. That situation is being improved for netbook systems atm.
The article also implies that Intel's foundries are a liability. That would be true if there really was useful "competition in the foundry market". Sure, if you want 45nm+ chips produced, there are a number of foundries that can do it. But once you start looking for 32nm foundries they get a lot rarer, and Intel has just announced it's building its new 22nm foundries. That's a whole generation ahead of anyone else in the industry and is a big competitive advantage (Smaller scale in chip foundries means more performance for the same power, or less power for the same performance.)
The 2-3 watts vs 5 watts for ARM vs Atom isn't too significant. The big problem with Atom was that the support systems (memory controller etc) draw ~20 watts. That situation is being improved for netbook systems atm.
Oh my god yes. If you could actually run an atom server in less than 10 watts for a 4GiB system, even before disk, I'd be renting those out instead of VPSs, and probably killing the competition on it, too.
My (perhaps unreasonably cynical) theory is that intel nerfed the desktop atoms because they don't want them to compete with their server chips in my applications. But, on the other hand, that's irrational, because when per-core performance doesn't matter, (and in virtualization, more, smaller cores are better than fewer, faster cores) AMD already beats Intel by quite a lot. And atoms certainly don't compete in applications where per-core performance matters, so yeah, that's probably not it.
But this article is wrong to right off x86 so easily.
Firstly, power consumption. It's right that ARM has lower power draw than x86. The article is wrong by how much, though. Very low power ARM chips draw much, much less than 2-3 watts. These are mostly for embedded systems, though.
The 2-3 watts vs 5 watts for ARM vs Atom isn't too significant. The big problem with Atom was that the support systems (memory controller etc) draw ~20 watts. That situation is being improved for netbook systems atm.
For sub-netbook systems, Intel is launching it's Moorestown architecture. This is probably still isn't dropping into the Smartphone market in this generation (despite Intel's marketing: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/01/moblin-linux...), but should be great for tablets: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/05/intel-fires-open...
The article also implies that Intel's foundries are a liability. That would be true if there really was useful "competition in the foundry market". Sure, if you want 45nm+ chips produced, there are a number of foundries that can do it. But once you start looking for 32nm foundries they get a lot rarer, and Intel has just announced it's building its new 22nm foundries. That's a whole generation ahead of anyone else in the industry and is a big competitive advantage (Smaller scale in chip foundries means more performance for the same power, or less power for the same performance.)