Choking ARMs Around Intel

Are Intel and AMDs traditional chips heading to a dump?

As Microsoft ports the next version of Windows onto ARM chips, Apple did the same (remember the iPhone launch?), Blackberry likely runs on them as well, plus all the Android devices, are we seeing the death of the traditional CPU as we know it?

While the people who do speciality work will still strive for the quad cores and GBs of ram to get their work done, what does the average office worker really need? Or your relatives who check their Hotmail and look over their headlines at MSN?

With a move to ARM ourselves, we'd look at far better battery life, far thinner and cooler (temperature) devices, and a whole expansion on form factors, whether that's to tablets, phones, or other unimagined areas, such as coming up with one device which powers all your experiences (phone/tablet mobile, computer home/office).

Even this week, CES brought us the introduction of the Motorola Atrix, which is a new smart phone which has the capability of being docked to power a regular monitor-keyboard-mouse setup. While, in my opinion, it needs a lot of refinement viewing from a distance, this is something different, almost that last piece to that future where you have one device for everything.

Who knows? It's an interesting concept, the question is how many years out is a good, truly polished version of this? One? Two? Five? We'll see. But I'm starting to think Intel has something to worry about, which is part of why they're moving into the ARM space.