Until now, the makers of Arm-based CPUs are the ones who have been unable to find an answer for x86, outside special markets where the competitivity of a device is determined primarily by the set of peripheral controllers included in the SoC and not by the included CPU, like smartphones, microcontrollers and various dedicated communication processors.

The Intel CPUs with Gracemont cores, i.e. Alder Lake N and Amston Lake, are the best for very cheap and small computers.

They have only an extremely feeble competition from Arm-based CPUs. Until very recently, the Arm CPUs with Cortex-A78 cores, which are approximately equivalent with the Gracemont cores, have been many times more expensive than the similar Intel CPUs. The older Arm cores, like the Cortex-A76 used by the latest Raspbery Pi are much slower, while the complete SoCs are not cheaper than the Intel CPUs.

Only during 2024 one cheap SBC with Mediatec Cortex-A78 cores has appeared and for early 2025 one cheap SBC with Qualcomm Cortex-A78 cores has been announced. These anemic Arm offerings are insignificant besides the deluge of small and cheap computers that use Intel Alder Lake N or Amston Lake CPUs.

Until now the manufacturers of Arm-based CPUs have never been able to compete with Intel in price and performance for general-purpose computers, unlike for microcontrollers and for smartphones. The makers of smartphone chipsets, i.e. Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm and Mediatec, together with NVIDIA, are the only companies that use up-to-date Arm CPU cores that can compete in performance with the x86 cores and their products do not make any attempt to compete in the market for cheap computing devices.

Lately Mediatec and Qualcomm have started to attempt to enter the market for embedded computers, but what they try to sell on this market is only their older chipsets, which have become obsolete for smartphones and which would have to be discontinued, unless a new market is found for them.

For several years, Qualcomm has attempted to introduce Arm-based laptops, but all of them have been simultaneously much more expensive and much slower than the x86 laptops. The new laptops with Qualcomm Oryon CPUs that have been launched this year are the first that are decent, but overall they are still inferior to the Intel or AMD alternatives.

Apple designs good Arm CPUs, but they could have as easily designed competitive x86 CPUs or POWER CPUs, had their licensing conditions been as convenient as those of Arm.

A modern ISA like Aarch64 simplifies a lot an instruction decoder that must decode many instructions in parallel, but even in an x86 CPU the area occupied by the instruction decoder together with the additional area occupied by a micro-operation cache in comparison with an instruction cache of the same size (measured in cached instructions) form a very small fraction of the total CPU core area.

Therefore, even if there exists an x86 penalty vs. Arm in core area and in power consumption, the penalty is only of a few percents, perhaps 10% at most, so when comparing an Arm core and an x86 core there are other microarchitectural details that are more important than what ISA must be decoded, because they can make one core several times better than the other, instead of providing only a few percents of advantage.