juanrga (nospam.delete@this.juanrga.com) on August 15, 2014 11:39 am wrote:
>
> There are broad evidence on how low-end ARM processors on 28nm planar node match
> or outperform best Intel designs (for the same target) on 22nm FinFET.
>
> The ISA advantage will be greatly reduced in the top-end side of the performance spectrum, but will not vanish.
> Keller mentioned during Core Day conference that his K12 core will have a "bigger engine" than its x86 sister
> thanks to the advantages of ARMv8 over x86-64, which allows to spend more transistors on compute.

Back when lots of RISC processors were developed to topple the CISC marketplace soon to be dominated by Intel if it was not already, MIPS publicly made the same argument but included cache as well based on their cores being smaller for the same performance or having greater performance for the same size.

I think the low end of the software ecosystem is as important if not more important than processor performance. ARM has a foothold through PDAs and tablets that the RISC processors never had but those are not replacements for the PCs that Intel used to gain a foothold into the workstation and server market. Intel of course will cover all bases and produce x86 processors to defend their established markets but it will take Microsoft to majorly screw up which I might argue has already happened.