The reviews on AMDs new release have been pretty lackluster, but a lot of people have been critical of the review methodology for not correctly addressing power. These are desktop chips too. I'm curious how the laptop chips will do when they come out.

Meanwhile the Snapdragon/Win boxes seem to be a comparability shit show as well.

One of the big issues is there are only two manufactures of x86 chips. You need an Intel license for 32-bit and an AMD license for the EM64T instructions. VIA did have a license they bought from Cyrix and it's still held by some company (I think in China or Taiwan) and they do make some (disappointing) chips.

IBM, Fujitsu and others had Intel licenses, but they all stopped making chips back in the 286/386 era (and I doubt any of them could get the AMD license even if they wanted to).

So there aren't enough companies around to even try to make competitors on the same instruction set. The last big one was Transmeta way back. But if it was more open or easier to license, I think we would see at least one or two startups trying to make M* level performance on the x86 ISA.