The pictures and words from Evan Blass of what looked to be an impressively thin Windows 10 Mobile phone powered by a “laptop-class Intel processor” could have turned out to be “much more than just a concept,” but we might not have much to conceptualize if what Thurrott is reporting is true.

Impressively thin? It could be “impossibly thin.”

The outlet’s Brad Sams claims from his sources that the phone was devised by Dell to run x86 with an Intel chip — a heat-intensive drive for such a thinly-designed phone. The thought was that a low-end Atom chip could be used in the phone, but that series was left behind in addition to most of Intel’s mobile application processors.

Additionally, we think that topping off with a total recall of Intel’s Basis fitness trackers because of overheating processors in the Peak models really put a kibosh on further progress with this phone.

Thurrott goes on to mention internal discussion at Microsoft about going x86 on what would be the “Surface phone”, but there seems to have been not much more than chatter about it.

All of this is not to say that Intel isn’t developing anything else for mobile — it has insisted that it is still working on Cherry Trail and Apollo Lake processors for mobile devices, though not necessarily for smartphones.

But with ARM design chips a clear focus for Microsoft in the meantime, the bet is that we won’t see anything like what was leaked in the near future.