Price Hurting Intel and AMD in Competition Against ARM

While Intel and AMD are making efforts to come up with low-power x86 processor platforms to compete with the plethora of ARM processor vendors, manufacturers of the target devices of these low-power x86 processors - tablets, netbooks, and smartphones; note that the architecture simply isn't competitive due to its prices. ARM processors are manufactured by a variety of companies, in a variety of different SoC configurations, and as such the tough competition among these companies ensure ARM processor platforms are comparatively cheaper to low-power x86 ones.

Intel recently debuted its 32 nm "Medfield" Atom processors, with power consumption as low as 11W for the platform. In the second half of 2012, it will launch another line of processors with under 10W power consumption, for high-end smartphones. AMD, on the other hand, will unveil "Hondo", which combines its x86 architecture with Radeon graphics IP, and a power consumption target of less than 5W. In 2013, it plans to launch the "Temash" APU, with power consumption under 2W, and built on the 28 nm process.