Even in multi-threaded benchmarks, where it should shine, it's getting murdered.
ARM is a very promising platform and there's no technical reason why it can't out-perform Intel. It's just a matter of engineering it with that intent. Right now it's primarily intended to be efficient and good enough for mobile phones.
> there's no technical reason why it can't out-perform Intel
I think "engineering capabilities and experience" is a valid technical reason.
But the real "reason" is most likely branch prediction and caching. I wouldn't be surprised if Intel's NetBurst microarchitecture was more complex than the entire CPU section of an ARM processor. I'm having trouble finding transistor count for the CPU section, for ARM.
ARM is a very promising platform and there's no technical reason why it can't out-perform Intel. It's just a matter of engineering it with that intent. Right now it's primarily intended to be efficient and good enough for mobile phones.