The industry is shifting to a model in which an increasing amount of computing is done in the cloud and delivered to handheld devices, which are powered predominantly by ARM-based processors. Historically, more computation was done on the client, most often a PC or notebook running an Intel chip, he said.

In addition, some cloud providers are looking at alternative, lower-power ARM chips for certain server workloads. "We will see more and more servers based on ARM because of the power savings users believe they can get," Brookwood said.

Intel sought to downplay that threat. "There's been some interest in low-power but it's been a bit overblown," said Dylan Larson, director of technology initiatives in Intel's data center group. He acknowledged that some workloads might benefit from the efficiency of certain very low-power chips.

"We won't be asleep at the wheel," he said, implying Intel will act to address the changing demands.

Some vendors already have. Just this week, SeaMicro introduced the second generation of its servers that use 256 low-power, dual-core Intel Atom processors, which Intel intended for use in netbooks. While Intel wasn't keen to support SeaMicro's efforts initially, it has changed its tune since the first server was received fairly well by the market, Brookwood said. "Instead of 'You're nuts,' Intel is now saying 'What can we do to help you,'" he said.