Quote Originally Posted by savantu View Post
IMO, when the players will overlap, AMD could find itself as a collateral victim. Intel has the resources and is willing ( already its marketing machine turned on ARM ) to steam roll ARM on its turf. I wouldn't be surprised if Intel allocated to Atom and other small factor SoC an order of magnitude more resources than ARM has.
Yet, ARM has an aces on its sleeve : it is a pure design house which licenses its designs and other carry the burden to implement them. ARM gets royalties of a few cents for each chip. That's extremely low, but when your designs are produced at a rate of 5m a day it adds up.
Basically ARM brings together Qualcom, Freescale, Samsung,etc. Intel isn't in battle only with ARM, but with those companies also.

Why could AMD end up as a collateral victim ? ARM is so widespread because it is cheap. ARM based CPUs sells for cents and rarely above a few $. It is safe to assume its trust in low power and low end x86 territory will be price driven ( they don't have the SW base ). Who is the low cost king of x86 ? AMD.
Intel doesn't go after every unit in the market for a very simple reason, its margins would crater from the lovely 60%+ it enjoys now. Every time AMD took a beating from Intel it retreated in the low cost part of the market where Intel wasn't willing to enter.
Well, that is about to change since ARM targets specifically that market. ARM won't bother to design the next Nehalem, but it will produce an ARM based Ontario-like CPU ( AR15 ? ).
I find your analysis to be flawed. For one thing, exactly the opposite of what you describe is actually happening. Intel is competing with ARM for the low margin parts and AMD is filling the gap in higher margin parts.

ARM might eventually make inroads into the laptop market, but it's already a force in the low power market. Intel might have a lot of disposable income but throwing a bunch of money at it won't necessarily make x86 better than ARM for low-power. I think AMD is smart not to try to enter that segment yet. Their little ontario would get strangled in the crib by ARM. AMD might have to compete with future products from ARM but Intel has to compete with current products from ARM.