Over the past decade, the ARM embedded computing platform has come to dominate smartphones and other applications where the primary emphasis is on low cost, power consumption, size and weight.
Over the same period, personal computing platforms based on Intel architectures have maintained a substantial lead in processing power, ensuring their continued dominance of most industrial computing applications. But over the last few years the architectures of ARM processors have been substantially upgraded by adding cores, instructions and faster pipelines, increasing their performance threshold to the point that they have begun to compete head-to-head with Intel and AMD PC processors in industry benchmarks. Embedded continues to stand for low cost and low power consumption but it does not mean low processing power anymore.