I think the author is making a big mistake in selling short the possibility of x86-class CPU performance on mobile.
Perhaps it comes from his iOS focus, but he's just wrong about the difficulty of transitioning the mobile software ecosystem to x86. Android is there today and has been for over a year (as the reviews of last year's x86 smartphones make abundantly clear). And, as we all know, Android is the majority of the devices, by a large margin.
It is true that iOS, Windows Phone and other platforms may have more trouble with an x86 transition, but so what? If Android makes a performance leap by moving to x86, other platforms will either find a way to keep up or they'll fall behind in the market. Either way, the mobile center-of-gravity will move towards x86-class CPU performance.
He really mentions the software problem more as an aside (and it's not like Android on x86 is painless; where there's ARM-only native code, it is JITed to x86 similarly to Apple's old Rosetta thing, which hurts performance and impacts power usage); the greater issue is that Intel isn't really ready (as of now, the Atom SoC stuff is still on an old process node, and has extremely weak GPUs), and it doesn't look like they will be anytime soon.
Also, of course, Atom isn't really all _that_ much faster than modern ARM.
It looks to me like Intel is readier than you think. Moreover, from the perspective of a web app developer, it doesn't matter whether Intel, Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung or whoever actually wins a CPU performance war - so long as one is fought. That I think we can count on.
Possibly. Really, given Intel's record in the mobile space, with impressive claims and products which are really extremely disappointing (generally from a power usage or GPU point of view), I'd like to see real benchmarks conducted by a reputable third party before getting too excited.
Motorola's Atom based RAZR was slower than their ARM based one. The x86 architecture isn't doing anything for you on mobile and so far the reason Intel has struggled is because they couldn't compete on power consumption, a more important factor. Since desktops can burn power, they can run a lot more transistors and run them more quickly. I don't see mobile CPU performance catching up to desktops soon.
Yes, the Razr i lost (mostly modestly) on 4 out of 5 performance benchmarks, but...
1. It modestly won on power consumption (9 hours vs 8).
2. Quoting from the review: "Aside from the benchmark results outlined above, the Medfield entry offered a marginally faster response to most actions."
3. Drawing CPU vs CPU conclusions from several benchmarks is complicated by one of the other differences between the two phones - the GPU (which is mostly an orthogonal question).
Oh, and then there's that benchmark the RAZR i won, by almost a factor of 2: SunSpider. While SunSpider has its limitations, it's the most still relevant benchmark of the set to the discussion we're having right now. And this performance difference has real-world consequences (another quote): "The results remain largely unchanged, but after spending a week with the device, we'd like to add that the web browser still gives a superb performance."
Intel's problem in mobile has never been performance (except when self-inflicted and they're past that). As of last year, it isn't power consumption either. Today, Intel's last problem is modems (specifically LTE modems), and they're hard at work on that one too: http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2013...
Finally, Intel's tagline for Silvermont is "~3X the Performance or ~5X Lower Power". If they pull that off and integrate it with a competitive LTE modem (and those are both still significant ifs even though today's indications look good), that's a ~2X SunSpider combined with a separate ~3X CPU leap. That won't just multiply because the bottlenecks will shift and SunSpider is the wrong benchmark CPU-bound JavaScript anyway. But however it plays out, that still would close a big chunk of the mobile-desktop JavaScript performance gap, especially when you notice that this year's Haswell focused on power consumption and, at best, only offers a small performance bump over last year's Ivy Bridge.
It isn't a lock, but it isn't a possibility to dismiss either.
Perhaps it comes from his iOS focus, but he's just wrong about the difficulty of transitioning the mobile software ecosystem to x86. Android is there today and has been for over a year (as the reviews of last year's x86 smartphones make abundantly clear). And, as we all know, Android is the majority of the devices, by a large margin.
It is true that iOS, Windows Phone and other platforms may have more trouble with an x86 transition, but so what? If Android makes a performance leap by moving to x86, other platforms will either find a way to keep up or they'll fall behind in the market. Either way, the mobile center-of-gravity will move towards x86-class CPU performance.