It really is stunning how quickly AMD and Intel were both able to respond to the MINIMAL (for now) competition that Snapdragon poses. Pretty much spoiled Qualcomm's party. But, that being said, the biggest advantage to ARM is power efficiency when software is optimized for it (and even when it isn't, to some degree), and even if Qualcomm ends up failing to jump to the top of the Windows / Linux / everything-else-except-Mac marketplace, they've opened the door in a way that no other ARM processor has been able to do. ARM is here to stay this time around. ARM is the future. Microsoft is heavily invested in it in a way I've never seen them invested in any other alternative architecture (not even PowerPC or Itanium). This is the kind of effort that it's always needed, because nothing is going to get us away from x86 without Windows being fully ported, and Windows applications being efficiently translated if not directly ported, themselves. That's finally happening, and it's great to see. Even if x86 hangs on for a couple more decades as a legacy architecture, ARM will become dominant. You can bet on that.
![Can ANY Laptop Beat a MacBook Air? [Intel vs AMD vs Snapdragon vs Apple]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/G9lRc217o1E/mqdefault.jpg)
It really is stunning how quickly AMD and Intel were both able to respond to the MINIMAL (for now) competition that Snapdragon poses. Pretty much spoiled Qualcomm's party. But, that being said, the biggest advantage to ARM is power efficiency when software is optimized for it (and even when it isn't, to some degree), and even if Qualcomm ends up failing to jump to the top of the Windows / Linux / everything-else-except-Mac marketplace, they've opened the door in a way that no other ARM processor has been able to do. ARM is here to stay this time around. ARM is the future. Microsoft is heavily invested in it in a way I've never seen them invested in any other alternative architecture (not even PowerPC or Itanium). This is the kind of effort that it's always needed, because nothing is going to get us away from x86 without Windows being fully ported, and Windows applications being efficiently translated if not directly ported, themselves. That's finally happening, and it's great to see. Even if x86 hangs on for a couple more decades as a legacy architecture, ARM will become dominant. You can bet on that.