"It's like taking a desktop and putting it in your pocket," said [VP of processor marketing — Eric Schorn], and it was clear that he considers this new design to be a pretty major shot across the bows of Intel and AMD. In case we were in any doubt, he turned the knife further: "The exciting place for for software developer graduates to go and hunt for work is no longer the desktop."

[...]why has Smartbook AG sent us this letter? Surely they can see that the genie is already out of the bottle. Furthermore, it hasn't even registered the trademark in the US, China, or countless other countries so what does it expect to achieve by threatening a few European journalists? Also, we can't find any evidence of Smartbook AG selling its products outside of Germany. How can it register a trademark in countries where it has no presence? Our feeling is that it's an indirect way of pressuring Qualcomm into settling the matter out of court and buying the trademark for as high a price as possible.

We asked the big question: is Dell thinking of offering ARM-only products in future? "It's not in our short-term plans — we will probably have a mix," [Bohar] said. "You can use it for single tasks, but it's not really powerful enough to multitask."

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.

Intel's decision to release new processors based on the potent Nehalem architecture has been long overdue. There's been little change in the previous 10 months, really, as the chip giant's harvested the range-topping LGA1366 architecture for all it's worth. Now, though, the introduction of the Lynnfield range of CPUs will see Intel transition much of its mid-to-high-end stock to LGA1156-based Core i5/i7 CPUs.

Rayfield doesn't pull his punches in assessing Intel's low power processor strategy, dismissing it as "dehydrating a notebook", but concedes that he needs to keep an eye on them.

We can think of ten reasons not to buy one, easily, but also one immutable rationale for throwing down a lot of cash for the MARS. It's fundamentally outlandish enough to be cool — a sheer brute-force approach to graphics. If you win the lottery or are lucky enough to work for Goldmine Sachs and it's bonus time, buy a bit of history... and a 5GHz Core i7 to get the most out of it. Everyone else wistfully laugh at the exuberance of ASUS' R+D department.

What if Microsoft offered a full version of Windows (as opposed to Windows Mobile or Windows CE) that used the ARM, rather than X86 (Intel and AMD) instruction set? Then it would be a straight hardware fight with Intel, in which ARM hopes its low power, low price processors will have an advantage.

Morris wouldn't be drawn on whether this will ever happen, but he seemed quietly confident it would, pointing out that Microsoft will be missing out on an increasingly large market if it doesn't. "The pieces for fundamental change are already within the industry," he said.

So who is the winner of this heated battle then? You are — the consumer. Whilst NVIDIA still came out on top, it did so with only the smallest of margins in most cases — and you can feel confident that owning a Radeon is no longer a blocker to a decent experience in Linux.