ARM has already established itself as a designer of low-power silicon, and their products and derivatives from manufacturers like Qualcomm are nearly universally found in iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. While five years ago ARM wasn't recognized as a high performing architecture type, they?ve come a long way with some seriously powerful, low-watt SoCs that we find in tablets like the iPad Air -- the A7 is designed by Apple based on ARM's 28-nanometer ARMv8 architecture.

The Windows and x86 story is different. X86 has always been a performance powerhouse, being the instruction set of choice for the world's most powerful systems. In recent years, companies like Intel and AMD have been focused on reducing their x86 chips? power consumption, producing results like Bay Trail and Temash, the former being a highly popular choice for mainstream Windows tablets.