"It potentially does spell trouble for ARM. It appears they now have Intel's full and undivided attention," said Olds. "If Intel sets its mind to it and throws everything into an effort to build a chip that can compete with or be better than ARM on power and performance issues, they can do this. They have the ability. The question is can they do it at a price they'd be happy with?"

However, Enderle noted that it will take more than a better chip for intel to succeed.

"They would have to displace the entire ecosystem, which now evolves around ARM," he explained. "That's massively expensive. When you've got an entrenched vendor, you need to spend 10 times what the vendor is spending. If you can't do that, you might as well go home. And 10 times what the collective ARM community is spending is a lot of money."

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at or subscribe to . Her e-mail address is .

in Computerworld's Processors Topic Center.