Comment by gvb

Normalization is nice for a mental exercise, but I cannot buy a normalized phone with a normalized i7 that fits in my normalized pocket. Engineering is the art of trade-offs and the i7 has traded off size and power to achieve speed. That is great when you have an i7-scale size and power budget, but if the i7 exceeds your power or size budget it is a non-starter regardless of how efficient (when normalized) it is. Full stop.

The implicit argument of the paper is that Intel could produce a direct size+power+speed replacement for a phone-scale ARM processor, they just need to dial the knobs to small+small+slower. The counter argument is that they have tried but not come close. The Atom line is roughly comparable with respect to speed, but size and power are a problem. The Galileo processor is roughly comparable with respect to power and size but speed is horribly lacking.