[haricm]

Drill, I partly agree with you. But as you know ARM is getting into servers in a big way. The idea is low power servers(green servers as it is called) of course, and there are several silicon vendors already working on it. ARM recently announced Cortex-A57 and A53 precisely for this segment. The A57 can be expected to have a similar performance to that of A15, but with higher clocks. Hence this discussion, I believe, is not totally irrelevant.

[drill_sarge]

It's not exclusively about the architecture (granted fully fledged x86 out-of-order cpus have some junk to carry around but the architecture overhead isn't that big). The assumption that always is made ARM = low power is just not true. At least not in all scenarios. Nobody expects a typical workstation x86 grade cpu to be competing with a designed for mobile arm-chip. But it's not about architecture, just look at the upcoming Atom chips. They seem to be very competitive with their arm counterparts. On the other side it is probably no problem to build a big arm processor like the typical intel/amd desktop cpu (not talking about shoving 5000 small mobile arm cores in it because that is just programmers and everyones nightmare). TL;DR You design a processor for a specific purpose regardless of architecture.

[ranjithparakkal]

Drill,

The thing is that ARM licenses its core, while Intel doesnt. ARM allows many many silicon vendors to do their own thing. Make their own server CPUs etc. Something they had never been able to do before.

I have no doubt that Intel will get competitive over time on the power front, if they are not already there yet. But people need to know that ARM is getting competitive on the performance front too. So that many silicon vendors, not just Intel, can come out with servers, and SOCs for other types of applications which is pure x86 right now.