My take here is not about magic ARM dust. I do remember the magic RISC dust days -- and I, as a lover of the elegant -- was on the losing side of that one. I think the basic threat to Intel and x86 is this:<p>- Intel operates as a high-margin business. Their CPUs aren&#x27;t $10 components, and they don&#x27;t really have any serious competition. The whole point of the word &quot;Wintel&quot; was that all the value in a PC was going to Microsoft (for the OS) and Intel (for the CPU). These mobile ARM chips aren&#x27;t like that at all. They&#x27;re just another component in the device, like the camera and the display.<p>- Scale. Ben Evans makes the case well here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ben-evans.com&#x2F;benedictevans&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;7&#x2F;mobile-ecosystems-and-the-death-of-pcs" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ben-evans.com&#x2F;benedictevans&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;7&#x2F;mobile-ecosyste...</a> . He writes:<p>&quot;And fourth, the broader scale advantage - the ARM&#x2F;iOS&#x2F;Android ecosystem is moving towards selling 10x more devices each year than the Wintel ecosystem. That&#x27;s a similar disparity to that between PowerPC&#x2F;Mac and Wintel 20 years ago.&quot;<p>I realize too that running a benchmark like GeekBench on iOS is not apples-to-apples running it on Mac OS X. But even if it&#x27;s not the case that the iPad Pro is a faster computer than a MacBook, it&#x27;s  close. But I really do think it&#x27;s faster -- it shows in browser-based benchmarks, which I think are a fair comparison even across iOS and OS X.<p>But in short: Intel doesn&#x27;t want to (and possibly can&#x27;t) compete on price, and they can&#x27;t compete on scale. Neither of those things are magic.