Intel Corp (INTC)

[Unkwn]

Well, even though I am not convinced that Core M is the right design for Intel to make up for lost ground, not all issues may stay unsolved. The thermal design seems crucial and I guess the OEMs have to learn how to deal with such potent hardware in tablets (same goes for the high end ARM designs nowadays, by the way).

The Nexus 9 also seems to make use of a lot of optimization regarding thermal distribution. Metal backplates with heat sinks connected may help there (what Apple does for quite a while already and may help them winning benchmarks).

One shouldn't also dismiss the performance a Core M delivers at 2 GHz and beyond, especially with complex/real application code. Nvidia's Denver seems to be quite bad at this. People report about lags and real life performance not holding up to the expectations given by benchmarks. This is crucial in the end. Maybe it's an optimization issue but it also seems to be supported by strongly varying benchmark results from different benchmarks.

Regarding Chrome, this seems a software/driver issue. I believe Intel is already working on it together with Glogle to fix it. Maybe they'll introduce some GPU supported rendering of the video format Google uses.