Might also be interesting to add that Intel had a very nice ARM platform (XScale) which was sold to Marvell. They had the full ARM license deal, not just the ability to put ARM cores on a micro like everyone else in the world.
So I would argue that Intel has a pretty good understanding of ARM strengths and their business model, they just think that they can go the distance and come up with something competitive. Even given the fantastic growth of ARM, Intel is about 100 times bigger so it's probably more useful to compare Intel to the processor manufacturers that use ARMs in mobile platforms.
There's a danger that Intel will continue to chase high profit sectors and stagnate technically due to lack of competition there. The gap between what is technically achievable and what we get today in x86 processors has been widening for years and is not slowing down.
That's a general problem with large companies, they often can't afford to pivot and succeed in lower profit sectors, even if its clear that the high profit sectors are going to stagnate and shrink over time.
Exactly. What they typically do is acquire someone who can. In Intel's case I'd doubt they would acquire ARM because they would probably have to continue to license the technology to everyone else (I don't really know what I'm talking about here). However, they could acquire someone who has the "low power CPU technology" they would need to compete. If you think about who that someone could be nobody really comes to mind. Maybe they could buy back Marvell. Qualcomm, Samsung, TI are clearly out of the question.
> However, they could acquire someone who has the "low power CPU technology"
The other possibility is that Atom will slowly become more competitive. Weirdly, I think the most important thing for that would be a solid Android-on-x86 story, so device manufacturers don't have to do so much custom GUI work.
So I would argue that Intel has a pretty good understanding of ARM strengths and their business model, they just think that they can go the distance and come up with something competitive. Even given the fantastic growth of ARM, Intel is about 100 times bigger so it's probably more useful to compare Intel to the processor manufacturers that use ARMs in mobile platforms.