Intel&#x27;s only got the ability to develop one microarchitecture family. When they try for more than one, things fall through the cracks and you get the Pentium 4 dead-end or the Atom&#x27;s lackluster performance.<p>Intel&#x27;s primary microarchitecture is aimed at laptops. It scales reasonably down to large tablet power levels and up to workstation power levels. For the high-performance server market, they can only throw cores and cache at the problem, with some enterprise features bolted on.<p>IBM&#x27;s always targeted the high-performance server market. For a while, their Power cores were also being used for workstations and even a desktop by Apple, but that&#x27;s never been the focus. They include things like decimal arithmetic and SMT and hardware transactional memory and they&#x27;ve been selling the high-end parts at 4-5GHz speeds for a long time.