It's 2012 and the opening question we asked the Mavens was;

"Thanks to a strategic deal with Motorola over devices and Google in terms of Android optimisation, do you think Intel can take a bite out of ARM's market dominance of phone and tablet chips?

"Even if it can, will it make any difference to your business?"

Cue rolling tumbleweed...

The Mavens were singularly unexcited.

So low was their excitement, in fact, that we had less responses than ever before - even the usually vocal mills(tm) had nothing to say on the subject.

The bright side?

Bolt Creative's Dave Castelnuovo had been accused of being too negative in 2011

"My new year's resolution is to look at things in an optimistic light," he stated. With this in mind, he declared it an "Absolutely brilliant move for all parties concerned!"

"Of course the new Atom chips are designed to be compatible with apps that currently run on the existing ARM architecture so I have full confidence that it should run perfectly, as advertised, in real world situations and will probably require zero additional testing."

Our sarcasm detection device exploded into flames at this point; we'll be billing Dave.

"Even if it did require a few more devices to test here and there, I feel like the additional fragmentation challenges will only make developers stronger and more capable which will result in better games for everyone. Yay," he ended. 

Bang goes another resolution.

Managing expectations

Viewing the situation as a man with hammer sees nails all around, Unity CEO David Helgason suggested developers should "Just use Unity".

"On a more serious note," he continued, "We intend to keep simplifying the development process and target as many platforms as we can with Unity and the rest through Union - our porting and distribution group. Intel et al. won't faze that."

Then a voice that addressed some deeper concerns over the hardware piped up - Will Luton of Mobile Pie.

"Having not dived in to the specifications ... the first thing I would question is battery drain. Intel's architecture is traditionally more power hungry, even if it's claiming it isn't. ARM has the jump on them with that."

"The second would be further device fragmentation. Apple managed a dual architecture in OS X for a while, but it wasn't without hitches for users and devs."

As for the rest of the Mavens panel? Silence...

That suggests Intel has plenty of developer relations work to do over the next 12 months.