[olympus]

Being able to go toe to toe with low-power areas says little about being able to compete against full-power areas, and vice versa. Intel is a laughing stock when trying to compete in low power areas even though they dominate full power. ARM is the only choice in low power outside of a few Chinese chips and Samsung's Exynos, but yet ARM hasn't made a dent in full power applications. The two areas do not scale as easily as they sound.

Intel has been iterating their design decades longer and was in stiff competition for much of that time period. They will be hard to catch in the desktop/laptop space for anyone starting with a cell phone CPU.

ARM has not had real competition in their market, most chipmakers are licensing ARM tech, so they should be easier to catch up to, which Apple has done (with a healthy dose of borrowed ideas from ARM).

[jsjohnst]

You do realize Exynos and the Apple A-series are both ARM processors. They didn’t “borrow” ideas from ARM, they licensed the IP and are fundamentally just better implementations of the base line IP with a few things added on.

[enitihas]

Isn't Exynos also ARM?

[olympus]

You're right, for some reason I was thinking Exynos wasn't ARM based because it wasn't Qualcomm- not sure why. That takes the list of ARM competition down to just the Chinese offerings, unless I'm mistaken about that.