Intel Corp (INTC)

[ibc]

Except that users don't want to sacrifice sheer compute power for low wattage.

That isn't true.

Desktop sales growth has been flat to declining relative to notebooks even before smartphones and tablet computers appeared. People value mobility over pure performance. Clearly you can deliver higher performance in a desktop vs. a laptop.

Intel is trading off performance for power with their 4.5W Broadwell.
People are buying Macbook Airs instead of more powerful and thicker laptops.

Sure, video editing with FCPro requires a lot of compute, but it's something that relatively few people use. Furthermore, media processing can be done more efficiently with accelerators which is why you'll see 4K video encode hardware appearing in very low wattage phones. There's no fundamental reason video processing needs a general purpose CPU like a Xeon as opposed to something more specialized.

1. Will Apple, for instance, abandon the x86 line for an ARM-based solution in their desktops and laptops?

Not in the short term. In the longer term, once performance is within say 20% of Intel, they may wish to take more control over their full-stack ecosystem and turn around chips at a rate faster than Intel's design cycles. They may wish to add hardware that Intel can't justify as Intel needs to serve other markets (such as more area dedicated to accelerators).

2. Will ARM in general displace x86?

Yes. It has a very large lead in very high volume computing platforms (iOS and Android). There's no reason why those ecosystems can't grow up into more capable computers over time.