Atom comparison
ARM is taking a fairly big risk with this, over and above the threat of failing to compete with Intel. By reducing the barriers to entry into the SoC space, it could be viewed as creating extra competition for its own ecosystem.
The likes of Qualcomm and NVIDIA didn't spend zillions of dollars developing Snapdragon and Tegra respectively, only to find themselves having to compete with numerous other entrants to the market, all facilitated by their supposed partner ARM. This could be an additional reason for ARM to continually make such a big point about how its targeting Intel.
ARM couldn't resist comparing the details of these macros to Intel's Atom. It reckons the performance optimised one will be a third of the physical size of the Atom and the power optimised one a quarter. The performance model will run at 2.0 GHz at a TDP of 1.9W, while the power optimised one will clock at up to 1 GHz, using only 0.5W. The Atom N270 runs at 1.6 GHz and 2.5W.
ARM's killer slide concerns a synthetic benchmark called Coremark, which is developed by a non-profit organisation in which ARM and Intel both have seats on the board. The graph shows how these Cortex A9 implementations compare to the Atom N270, according to Coremark.
