X86 based processors dominate the laptop & desktop markets, while ARM based chips rule the phone and tablet world. This has been the natural order of things for as long as we can remember, however Windows 8 could finally turn the tide for ARM. According to Rob Chandhok, senior vice president at Qualcomm, the company is preparing a 
ARM’s built its business around power-efficient chips that are perfect for mobile applications (like tablets and smartphones), but that pedigree could transfer over to another technical arena as well, one that has traditionally been dominated by Intel and AMD: high-powered computing. In fact, Sumit Gupta, who serves as the senior manager of Nvidia’s Tesla GPU Computing HPC business, says that ARM chips are “inherently much more energy efficient than an x86 CPU” – and that fact makes Nvidia feel that the future of supercomputing lies in ARM.
When it comes to PCs, AMD processors are the only thing keeping Intel from complete and utter market domination. But could the plucky little David (OK, AMD's actually pretty pretty big) be preparing to throw in the towel against Intel’s x86 Goliath? A couple of comments by AMD spokesmen over the past few days makes the company's future on the PC seem much more hazy than it did just a few weeks ago, when Bulldozer launched.
Intel is itching to get a toehold in the mobile device market. But unless Apple switches its much vaunted mobile devices to the x86 processor architecture on a whim, the only way Intel can hope to achieve a position approaching strength in the mobile market is by supporting Android. The real question now is not whether Android will run on Intel’s x86-based processors or not, as we already know the answer to it is yes, but how well.
In what has to be arguably one of its most interesting revelations, Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs has revealed that the late Apple CEO wanted the iPad to be powered by an Intel chip. If Jobs had had his way, Intel would have found itself in the driver’s seat in the burgeoning tablet market, something the chip maker is unlikely to achieve in the coming years according to a new report by DisplaySearch.
When Oracle acquired Sun last year, it did so for things like the Java platform and the Solaris operating system, not servers running on Intel's x86 architecture. In fact, even though Sun thought it could become a major seller of x86 servers prior to the buyout, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison now says that the company makes next to no money on them and plans to start phasing x86-based servers out entirely in 2012 favor of more profitable Solaris/SPARC-based hardware.
Microsoft is unlike other pretenders to the tablet throne, all of whom are simply following Apple’s lead, in that it wants Windows 8-based tablets to deliver both the versatility and power of traditional PCs and the pickup-and-play ease of media tablets. But that’s where the differences end as Redmond also seems to have a fair amount of faith in the old adage “when in Rome . . .” Like Apple, the pioneer of the modern app store, MS also plans to keep 30 percent of all app sales. But that’s not the only part of Apple’s app distribution model to have caught Microsoft's fancy.
They say fate's a fickle mistress, but destiny's got nothing on the free market. For every Microsoft-esque success story, there's the burnt out husk of Sun Microsystems (R.I.P.). The really interesting tales have nothing to do with overwhelming successes or overwhelming failures, though; any budding novelist can tell you that a good story needs some tension.
It was 30 years ago to the day when IBM released it's first personal computer, the IBM PC 5150. Two days ago, an IBM executive essentially 
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