Please update for 2015

Excellent article, although perhaps comparing Intel and ARM architectures is quite difficult due to their historical target markets. However, I love the fact that someone has written about different ARM processors and which ones the consumer should consider when buying tablets/phones; there is a plethora of devices now based on different ARM architectures so it's difficult to know (for end consumers) which ones are likely to perform better than others... Of course, device and OS optimisation plays a big part in the overall performance but still, knowing what the processor is capable of does provide some idea of what the performance should be like.

Great article, who knows what will happen with ARM in just a few years.

i hope you re do this with the new z3000 chip!

You are comparing bananas with watermelons. I met arm architecture from ACORN Archimedes when Intel was on 8086 and 8088. I was very happy because that technology was not destroyed  and  was with me inside my Mobile phone. Arm will never be a desktop replacement processor as the majority of software is written for Intel processors even in a Mac. The software houses have invested millions on that code that needs to re written. Also arm can not competes I3, I5, or I7 processors. I don't love Intel but is the only company that has trust in business market. I recently bought  a chip tablet phone for my wife the Asus fonepad. I was impressed with the performance of that single core atom and with hyper threading and the super low power consumption. In every day use is smooth like my quad core note 8. !!!!!!!

Why wasn't clover trail + used rather than Clovertrail . Much better GPU and power usage.

Can't wait until I can get a fan-less arm laptop with reasonable performance. Great article.

What about the à4-12/50 and a6-1450, couldn't you secure some test units? And if you can't get power consumption why not use platform numbers for very rough comparison?

rhere is no competition between x86 to arm.   arm is for android(linux); intel is for windows.  and arm cpus dont need to scale up to intel level since gpus can do the high performance computing, gpus have been outcomputing cpus in tests since 2008.  nvidia has project denver set to 2015,  by then they will have arm cpus and gpus  for linux notebooks.  for phones and tablets,  its going to be cortex a12 cpus and intel graphics gpu(powervr).  intel cpus consume 10x more power than arm cpus while nvidia gpus use 10x power as  imagination tech.

Finally, a perfectly concise, informative and unbiased x86 vs ARM article.

Anandtech should take note!