Digital Home Thoughts: The Power Consumption Arms Race is a Close One

"Today he observed that on the CPU side of the house, the power difference between ARM and x86 is drastically reduced over what it was. If you’ve been following the progress of Intel’s Atom platform, that’s no surprise. And it doesn’t take an engineering degree to know that larger backlit displays can consume more power that most other device components."

To be honest, I am not sure if there really needs to be a winner when it comes to the battle between ARM and x86. ARM chips are definitely improving in performance, while x86 CPUs have dropped considerably in their power consumption. Both architectures have viable OSes that will work on them from Microsoft, Google or the Linux community, and flexibility does not really matter much with most of the devices are using, as they seem to be quite specialized, or run an application layer, like a web browser. At the end of the day, I cannot imagine the typical consumer really caring anymore since it simply will not matter.