Absolutely. So "ARM is lower power than Atom" isn't a "core" statement, it's an SOC/platform statement. Shouldn't we be focused on that instead of the cores? Maybe the ARM ISA isn't fundamentally "lower power" than x86.

This paper focused on cores and core power, not SOC power, so it seems like the core power was what was being discussed here.

Do you have any idea how GMA950 graphics or GMA500 graphics compare to the graphics inside the current ARM SOCs used in phones & tablets? Isn't GMA500 a rebranded Imagination graphics core? Maybe there's a reason why it's higher power graphics (DX10 vs OpenGL, FPS, supported resolutions, etc). Is there some reason to think that the core when used by Intel is somehow less efficient than when it's used by other SOC vendors?

When Nvidia does GFX cards for PCs, they're high power and high performance. When they do them for tablets/phones, they're lower power and lower performance. Maybe all of this "power" arguing really just a design target issue.