[microarchitect]

What they are missing is that it's not performance per watt, but performance per watt per dollar.

Intel may be able to build lower power/faster chips but their foundries aren't cheap, neither are the thousands of engineers Intel puts on each SoC, and technology scaling is only getting more and more expensive.

It's a classic case of the innovators dilemma. Intel are optimized to sell very fast chips that cost hundreds of dollars but the performance of fast-ish chips that cost a few dollars has almost caught up to them and Intel simply can't compete without a complete restructuring. A further complicating factor is the fact that ARM is a weird many-headed chimera [1] that Intel simply can't kill they way the did with x86 competitors like AMD.

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/7112/the-arm-diaries-part-1-ho...