[throw2016]

I think the problem is while ARM is good at lower power the moment you need sustained performance the power requirements shoot up and throttling begins.

The flagship ARM A72 and A73 are not adequate for true desktop class performance, somewhat catching up to Intel's low end core u laptop chips. It's increasingly looking like to get x86 level performance ARM would lose its low power advantages.

The AMD Zen on the other hand appears to be extremely efficient. I fiddled with ARM boards on and off for over 3 years excited by the possibilities of tiny form factor desktop class computing at laughably minimal costs with ARM SOCs. The reality is the extremely poor to non existent driver support and the 'effectively closed' ARM ecosystem is a deal breaker that left me disillusioned and strangely relieved with the the open PC ecosystem.

[5ilv3r]

Oddly, ARM is eating the PC architecture from the inside. What's on your raid card? An arm. What's in your usb devices? An arm. What's in your SSD? An arm. A PC is beginning to look like a network of arms with an intel driving. How long will the intel core last?

[gpderetta]

Intel margins in that single chip are probably a few orders of magnitude of ARM royalties on all those embedded CPUs combined. Intel has little to fear from those chips.

On the other hand, Apple does seem to have the capability to design competitive desktop class CPUs, so who knows.

[pertymcpert]

The absurd margins are in fact the reason why Intel need to fear ARM. It gives an incentive to lower the costs by designing them out of systems, even if it means sacrificing peak performance.

[gcp]

Apple doesn't use ARM designs. Their own A10 leaves the ARM designs far behind. They just use the architecture.