Its a response because they had to respond, they were called out on the playground by Intel.

I find it hugely amusing that Intel bought the StrongARM business from DEC (as well as the Alpha team back in the day) and put their 'embedded' guys on it (think 8051/8048) and were surprised that they didn't develop any market share.

At the time Intel felt like 'embedded' chips had to be cheap, low power, and peripheral rich. They knew this to be true because they had tried an 8086 SOC chip, it was called the 80186 and it was an utter failure for them. (disclaimer I was the Systems Validation engineer on the 80186 when I worked there in '84).

So the company learned that "nobody" wanted high end SOCs, what they wanted was a replacable "core" CPU, an IO chip which provided a variety of peripherals, and a memory controller chip that could interface to the current memory technology.

Their reasoning was quite sound, and literally for decades they have been executing against this 'north bridge' / cpu / 'south bridge' architecture plan. AMD through a curve ball when they integrated the memory controller on the Opteron, it made for faster memory performance and they got some design wins out of it, however Intel knew that memory tech would change and AMD would be up a creek, which they sorta were when FBDIMMs and DDR3 started coming out and their chips only talked DDR2.

The scenery changed however with an explosion of embedded systems. Did you know that MIPS was the #1 embedded computer architecture (by volume) for a while because every HP printer had one in it? SyByte (acquired by Broadcom) answered with a nice 64 bit embedded MIPS architecture chip and it fueled a lot of embedded devices with a lot of potential. And of course ARM came out of 'nowhere' (not really of course, its been 35 years of hill climb but it seemed to many that they were suddenly more relevant) and they started getting design wins in cell phones which grew to smart phones and then to tablets. There was a great big 'arm' - ageddon when a ASUS and a couple of other laptop makers were going to ship ARM based laptops and (rumor has it) Intel and Microsoft threatened withdrawing all support if they shipped them. (which would have killed these companies outright)

But there really isn't anything those two can do about Apple and Apple's use of ARM in the iPod and iPhone and then iPad really created a volume channel for ARM which, given the resources of more licenses has been evolving the architecture more rapidly, and Intel sold StrongARM to Marvell who has been using it in GuruPlug and elsewhere so it suddenly becomes a 'threat' on Intel's radar when they find the fastest growing segment of electronics that need high margin microprocessors (the place they like to lead) isn't using their architecture.

So to anyone who has listened to their marketing spin on how you should use an Atom instead of an ARM, and told Intel "Except it still takes 4 chips for just the base system and its slower and it takes more power and it doesn't use your 64 bit extensions, ..." Intel needs to respond, because they know they are losing the next design to ARM, again.

And Intel gets lower margin on Atom than it does on Pentium * so it has to be sensitive about making Atom "too" good. Rock meet hard place, and there you will find Intel.

Which brings us to the current round of chip wars.

In ARM's camp their biggest issue is that they don't have a 64 bit ISA specification in production [1] (although I believe the Tegra3 is supposed to be 64 bit) Intel's biggest problem is that they don't have anywhere close to the power headroom that ARM does.

The 'next round' (the iPad 3, the Android Tablets, smartphones) seems to be dominated by ARM architectures and Intel wants in apparently. This bit about their 3D architecture is a 'talking point' to explain why things will be different now than they were the last time they tried to get folks to design in an x86 ISA.

[1] http://www.arm.com/products/processors/index.php