Sounds to me if Apple bought ARM the DOJ would soon get involved to break it apart.

Yes, in every modern smartphone including the N900.

IMHO it's Intel's anticompetitive practices that went on for years and for which they were fined 1,2 billion euros by the EU that allowed them to outrun AMD.

An ARM processor is used in pretty much every single phone(smart and dumb) and other electronic gadget you can ever think of that isn't a PC. ARM already utterly dominates the embedded market, it's Intel that's trying to squeeze in.

Yes but most users don't see the "ARM inside" logo so what do they care? The intel logo makes an impact - it's advertising and it's on every second PC.

So still I ask my question:

Why did Nokia choose intel? - I don't think that unifying the mobile linux distributions was THAT important to them or that Moblin represented any competition.

It wouldn't even get that far.

Joining with Moblin wasn't about reducing compeition-- it's about increasing scale. Of course unifying the distributions was important.

The brand doesn't run your devices, the CPU does.

1) That way they don't have all their eggs in one basket. Their partnering with Intel doesn't mean they'll stop using ARM.

2) Intel needs to get into embedded/mobile badly and is willing to put considerable effort in software and hardware platform development and has a long history in open source. Moblin and Maemo were very similar so it makes a lot of sense to get together. Both win.

3) ARM only designs CPU's, then licence them for manufacturers to build and that's it. What would Nokia get from partnering with them directly?

Don't make the mistake of equating the mobile market with commodity PC machines.

Don't make the mistake of underestimating ARM in the embedded market... they cover some 70+% of the marketshare.

Some say they're the odd couple out without a significant marketshare in the smartphone\highend phone segment... plus, I guess they have some similar strategies that can be aligned (both use open source community to further their business, etc.)

Well... that in the context of apple buying them - that would certainly create a loss.
Anyway the rumors of ARM being bought by apple freak me out.

Brand is very important. Most basic users have no idea of what ARM is. If you'd present them a high end ARM notebook and a low end Intel, most of them would choose the one they've heard of.
But I guess you are right about not comparing the PC market with the mobile market and manufacturers will choose X86 when/if it will be "ripe".

I'm glad to be using linux and being able those whenever I want from whatever I want (ARM/X86)

Personally I don't think x86 could replace ARM/RISC now or in the future for mobile devices.I won't say can't or never thats just asking to be proved wrong. CISC is just complete overkill imho.

ARM works well, considering its in the iPad and is standard for mobile device manufacturers (people don't know or care for the most part) its dominance isn't going to change for a time and of course there'll be plenty of improvements.

This is being typed from a netbook with a VIA-C7 which isn't perticularly great in my opinion. My sisters netbook with an Atom isn't much better really but thankfully using a form of linux means a lot of these factors can b ignored. it would take way too much effort i think to modify these for a smart phone.

For some extra information what most people call x64 is really supposed to be called x86-64 meaning that its like an extended version of x86, details are a bit tricky. We haven't moved over to pure x64 in the most part (cept for servers and supercomputers i think) as all the old OS and programs would need remade (don't know if completely rewrote or just modified and compiled - this is didn't need to know for my exams so I don't remember exactly) Pure x64 supports massive amounts of ram etc which isn't possible yet.

Wether the the OS used is 8, 16, 32, 64 bit depends purely on the cpu used. I hope I'm not talking down to any one here, and i'm new, but it seems like this is stuff that folk don't know and i think is interesting and useful.

The Nokia Rapido processor is an ARM. So, Nokia has a partnering with ARM.

http://pdadb.net/index.php?m=cpu and find "Nokia".

At this moment, the only x86 device from Nokia is the booklet.

That has nothing to do with the architecture -- Intel's superior process scaling just means that Intel is great at process scaling, but they could do equally well shrinking ARM chips if they still made them. Not that this matters, in the end -- Intel doesn't make ARMs, and TI doesn't make Atom SoCs, so the question is how their products actually compare, not how they ended up that way.

And ARM already wins big in performance/watt, regardless of whether it's "a step behind". (Can you imagine what a 20nm ARM would do? )

Except that no corporation wants desktop software running on mobiles, because the UX is horrible with unoptimized software on touchscreens, QWERTY thumbpads, and the like. They just don't see the added functionality as a selling point. So as nice as it might be to power users, it doesn't enter into any of the decision-making that matters (barring some Pandora-like team building a hobbyist mobile based on x86).

Moreover, I've only ever had occasion to use a handful of x86 binary-only software on Linux -- Skype, Flash player, and Google Earth are the only apps that come to mind, along with a few closed hardware drivers (which are platform-dependent anyway). Right now my main desktop is a pure x86_64 system, with no 32-bit compatibility layer, and I'm doing fine with none of those. So I don't really see the big advantage for cross-platform binaries -- source-compatibility is enough.

Not to answer for sjgadsby, but his statements are objectively based. Everyone who knows anything about CPU architecture (including CISC fans -- x86 is quite possibly the ugliest CISC in the world) agrees that x86 is a huge bag of fail, but since backwards compatibility rules the market, it keeps going.

No, that's the question to argue endlessly about. We will always have RISC and CISC chips, they will always be reasonably competitive, and the argument will never be settled.

Certainly, if the RISC/CISC war were to be won (by RISC, obviously (me? biased? )), that would settle the x86/ARM battle for high-powered mobiles, and indeed everywhere else. But since that won't happen, x86/ARM will happen on its own -- since nobody codes assembler, and compilers optimize code beyond recognition anyway, ideology will prove subservient to practical effects (which is faster? which uses less power? which is compatible with relevant binaries?)

Then your reading is woefully inadequate. x86 is one specific CISC family, and it has a head start for certain markets (starting with desktops (i.e. the IBM PC) and scaling upwards to servers), sure. It has almost no share in the handheld market -- an incursion here or there (HP LX100 anyone?), including Intel's current push, but as yet no long-term presence. Their success on the desktop was directly tied to the success of the IBM PC architecture, which in turn succeeded not due to any particular technical win, but because of the PC clones -- other systems using different CPUs never got that level of commoditization, so they got squeezed out.

But that says nothing to the overall CISC/RISC war, and RISC (and more specifically and relevantly, ARM) has an equally big head start in the handheld market. Which just might say more about which one will win the handheld market.

The last bit is just plain wrong -- RISC are simpler, therefore (all else being equal) cheaper to manufacture.