Late last month, Intel dropped by my office with a power engineer for a rare demonstration of its competitive position versus NVIDIA's Tegra 3 when it came to power consumption. Like most companies in the mobile space, Intel doesn't just rely on device level power testing to determine battery life. In order to ensure that its CPU, GPU, memory controller and even NAND are all as power efficient as possible, most companies will measure power consumption directly on a tablet or smartphone motherboard.

The process would be a piece of cake if you had measurement points already prepared on the board, but in most cases Intel (and its competitors) are taking apart a retail device and hunting for a way to measure CPU or GPU power. I described how it's done in the original article.

The previous article focused on an admittedly not too interesting comparison: Intel's Atom Z2760 (Clover Trail) versus NVIDIA's Tegra 3. After much pleading, Intel returned with two more tablets: a Dell XPS 10 using Qualcomm's APQ8060A SoC (dual-core 28nm Krait) and a Nexus 10 using Samsung's Exynos 5 Dual (dual-core 32nm Cortex A15). What was a walk in the park for Atom all of the sudden became much more challenging. Both of these SoCs are built on very modern, low power manufacturing processes and Intel no longer has a performance advantage compared to the Exynos 5.

Read on for our analysis.

At AMD’s 2012 Financial Analyst Day, as part of their presentation on their future strategy AMD’s CTO Mark Papermaster announced that AMD would be looking into integrating 3^rd party IP into future AMD APUs. At the time there was a strong assumption that this would be mobile focused – perhaps in the form of a cellular modem or an ARM core – and it turns out the assumptions were both right and wrong. Today AMD is announcing that they are in fact going to start integrating ARM cores into future APUs starting in 2013, but not in the way you’re probably thinking.

Starting with part of their 2013 APU lineup, AMD will be adding an ARM Cortex-A5 processor to the APU for the purpose of adopting ARM's TrustZone secure hardware platform technology. By adopting TrustZone AMD will be able to quickly add support for a secure hardware platform to their APUs, and at the same time they'll be able to leverage the existing base of TrustZone application developers. Today we'll go into why AMD is doing this, and what this means for their various product initiatives, so read on for the full scoop.