E2: MID - ‘Scaled down’ PC or ‘Souped up´’ handheld?

This new emerging MID (Mobile Internet Devices, also called Ultra Mobile PC - UMPC - by others) market has quite a few dynamics going on for what seems to be a promising driver for future consumer electronic equipment growth. There are many players that will be competing for the lion´s share of this market. The usage scenarios of the MID necessitate an effective combination of very high performance with low power consumption. This means that existing high performance, personal computer focused, CPU architectures will need to battle power consumption, and existing consumer focused, low power, embedded core architectures will need to address performance, in order to penetrate this market segment. Last, but not the least, there remains the question of whether backward software compatibility will be the determining factor of which architecture approach will ultimately dominate the MID market.