Intel has a battle on its hands competing with ARM  in the handheld arena, the company's star technologist Pat Gelsinger told yesterday's press teleconference at which he admitted that multicore performance was being hampered by the difficulties of parallel programming.

"ARM is a good architecture. It has proven success in the handset space," Gelsinger said. Intel had made a start with the Atom processor, which had reduced the 5w to 6w thermal design power (TDP) of 'bottom end' Centrinos by an order of magnitude to around half a watt.

Far be it from me to contradict Mr Gelsinger (and my recording of the teleconference is crackly at this point) but he seemed not to be comparing like with like here. The TDP of the Atom 230 is listed as 4w and that of the N270 as 2.5w. The average power drain is closer to 0.5w, but that is not the same thing.

And as an ARM man told me darkly: "Look at the standby power." The maximum power in sleep mode of the N270 is listed as 0.5w, which means you are not going to leave it in instant-on standby if you can avoid it.

To be fair to Gelsinger, his briefing was short on triumphalism. He came close to admitting that Arm was ahead on handset power consumption and that it would take time for Intel to catch up.

"We are aiming for platform-level [ie whole system] power consumption in the tens of milliwatt range, which puts you firmly into the handset kind of power envelope, with further reductions in chip size....We have said that over the next couple of years [my italics] we are going to get those milliwatt idle performance numbers."

Gelsinger also revealed that Intel planned to use Atoms in systems-on-a-chip (SoCs). This is typically how ARM cores are used: chipmakers license the core design and wrap their own logic round it.

Gelsinger's main message seemed to be that his company believed the  familiarity and scope of the Intel architecture (IA) would see off competition both from ARM and upstart GPU makers (see today's news story).

He asked: "Will IA displace ARM? It would be decades before that is a consideration because of the momentum [ARM] has. But we do see this ...continued wall of IA, going from petaflop machines with Xeons down to milliwatt machines with Atoms- this architectural continuity - is a value proposition that is at the core of Intel's strategic thrust."