Venture capital , so they might not be as crazy as they seem. Dell admitted last year that it also has been . Even Google might be getting in on the act; , a tech startup that was rumoured to have been designing an ARM-based server.

Right now ARM chips aren't found much outside of phones and tablets, although they're doing very nicely in that regard. They power the vast majority of mobile devices around the world, and have done so for some years. ARM doesn't make chips itself but instead licenses the design to manufacturers like Samsung, Texas Instruments and Qualcomm.

Although , with 40-bit memory addressing and virtualization extensions, ARM chips just can't compare to comparable Intel or AMD chips in out-and-out performance, so they aren't an obvious competitor to x86 when it comes to servers.

However, the goal is to produce computers that draw significantly less power compared to x86 offerings, making them massively cheaper to run. Manufacturers talk of power-per-watt figures, and here ARM chips win without even breaking a sweat.

Intel is feeling the pressure. Because many companies manufacture ARM chips, it's under attack from several different directions at once. Earlier this year Nvidia announced it was , for example, and late last year .