My take is that the analysis refers to Intel's long-term prospects, not today's or yesterdays's revenue. These reports serve as a foundation to guide decisions on future long-term investments.
Apple is the only manufacturer that actually produces competitive processors. Qualcomm is lagging behind x86 by at least a factor 2 compared to laptop chips and by factor 6 compared to desktop chips.
On top of that the arm laptops that have been announced were significantly more expensive than an equivalent x86 laptop and the x86 emulation isn't good enough to count on it.
Your talking about what’s on the market right now, or coming out based on existing tech. It’s exactly that kind one short term “everything’s fine, we’re doing great as we are” thinking that the OP article is deconstructing. It’s what killed Nokia, Blackberry and Palm, as he pointed out. Chip fabricators like Intel are making investments now that won’t affect the market for 6 years (2014 announcement of expected launch of 450nm tech in 2020).
ARM tech is on an intersect trajectory with x86 tech, and it’s only a matter of time before those lines cross. Up until then Intel will do fine. After that, all bets are off. Fortunately for Intel, they’re a couple of steps ahead of you in that at least they now see the problem.
Not trying to be pedantic, just so that no one gets confused.
Jim Keller, who's been on both sides of the table, x86 with AMD and ARM with Apple, expects that a fully developed ARM CPU will be 15-30% more efficient than their x86 counterparts.
What makes ARM fundamentally better than Intel? The instruction set? I just don’t see it. Intel has an incomprehensibly massive installed base of compatible software. All other things being equal, why does ARM catch up?
Right now judging from Cloudflare's benchmarks, the win will be in TDP. [1] Heat is a very nasty issue to handle in large datacenters, and can end up costing quite a bit in cooling. Intel's been making some great strides in this area, but ARM chips like Qualcomm's Cintriq are pretty tempting in this space.
I guess it depends for what sort of compute. For a heavy monolythic computation isn’t CISC a structurally faster approach? For lots of cheap, low wattage micro-services/containers I could see ARM being more efficient/cheaper.
Intel is not fighting for its life by any stretch of the imagination.