It has been speculated for a long time (I have been hearing it atleast since 2007) That Atom will match the power consumption of ARM in 2012 timeframe. The world (and Intel) knew for a long time that the platform for next generation computing is handheld devices. Intel required time for course correction to intersect this reality and the above data Indicates that the intersection is happening at the tipping point when the entire world is going gaga over smartphones and tablets. It is inevitable that either Medfield or some future architecture will achieve parity with ARM. The question today should be what does the Industry want? For an ARM based architecture I have today SoC's from TI, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, BRCM etc. Do I want the PC era wintel monopoly for the tablet era? The refrain till recently was that the wintel monopoly will succeed in the mobile era due to the portability of the application built for X86 architecture on windows platform. In todays world of google marketplace and apple appstore I am not sure to what extend this argument holds true.

It is equally difficult Running Linux on an Old box. My Machine at home is a Cyrix 133Mhz(Or is it 233Mhz?) Machine The last time I installed Linux on it It became horribly sloooooow. The reason? The distro I had used had binaries compiled for the latest and greatest pentium architecture. I investigated downloading and compiling the source. But when told that on a 1Ghz machine the build took more than two days. I quitely switched back to Win98.