Updates to this story
Sources very close to the board at the Intel Corporation are wondering quite how long the current CEO and president Paul Otellini can hang on in there.
Those in the know, and familiar with the board, told TechEye that Mr Otellini's position is not as secure as it might seem on the face of it.
Otellini delivered a keynote speech last week at IDF and seemed rather nervous and under strain.
The reason is, we're told, that old timers such as Andy Grove, Craig Barrett and Dr Moore of the famous Moore's Law don't think that Intel's smartphone strategy, involving millions of dollars, is working out.
Intel - as usual - was unavailable for comment on the story. Andy Bryant (pictured below) is tipped to be Intel's next CEO.
So off-hand, it most likely requires that Intel engineers achieve that power envelope in the very near term, before ARM not only consolidates it's hold on this market, but arrogantly attempts an incursion into Intel's own backyard, especially the lucrative mobile computing one, starting with Tablets, moving on to netbooks and possibly, assuming business applications and gaming becomes possible, laptops and desktop substitutes.
No idea how ARM rates now or in future versions as a server or super computer.
No, my supposedly learned friend, the answer is to let the marketplace decide winners and losers. And as far as your comment about ARM 'arrogantly" attempting to move into Intel's 'own backyard'? What a pant load. Intel has no right or reason to expect to 'own' anything, much less a backyard. They should have to continue to innovate to maintain market share in any area. If you don't continue making your customers happy, then you LOSE! If ARM's licensees can make better (from the perspective of customers) devices than Intel, SO BE IT.
You do strike a good point with Intel having to do things in the very near term though. ARM's Eagle is on its way, and that might make things very difficult for Intel. It clearly has the instruction advantage.
What especially makes me wonder is that the Atom core architecture seems to have been standing still for ages. For over two years now, in fact, and some whisper the next architecture (and with this I don't mean just a die shrink) may even appear only in 2013. AMD pretty much made a whole new low power architecture in that time, being Bobcat... If they're really serious about this, surely they'd put some more effort in it?
With the Larrabee failure in mind, it kind of makes me wonder whether there may actually be (and this statement may shock some) a limit to Intel's R&D capabilities.