however they are desiners, they dont make chips they expect you to do that
freescale and IBM seem to have the best chips with other companies doing better bridge / IO chips. just take a look at gensai
they do say more performance per watt but most of the examples i have seen about that is super computers using the Alt Vec unit which up until now has been in a luege of its own compared to SSE, how it compares now i dont know but i do know intel closed the gap but are using the "brute force" aproch to do so
i think in a copule of years we will see AMDs NUMA arcitecture pay off and intel changing its tune compared to the FSB aproch, should be intresting
however if you want low power you just cant beat ARM, howevre they dont really have any "heavy hitters" in terms of performance but rely more on coprocessors, that said a coprosser is a very easy thing to hook up compared to other chips and dosent even have to be built into the design (care for a 387 coprocessor chip hooked up to your Z)
there is even hooks in the instruction set so that coprocessor usage is transperent (it looks like <opcode> <coproccesor number> <data 1> <data 2>) as you can see its fairly flexible as it dosent specify the data sent, only the communication path. hence why there are so many diffrent arm varients (that and ARM is also a fabless manufacturer, they deal in IP)
one clasic example of this is the iwmmxt or wmmx, the mmx of the xscale. its actually a coprocessor and could be added to any arm chip if you wantnded it too.
well gone enough off topic. when it comes to a laptop design you have to really ask yourself what do i need it for. if you anser games then a x86 would be hard to beat (even a scaled up arm (ie 3GHz arm) would not match it, when you get to that sort of performance level arm dosent really compete) if its moives, a bit of compiling and webserfing then the new dual iMX3 design i am thinkning about would be great
