Intel has a lot of threats lately. Things seem to be moving towards a small die and MCM strategy to get better yields and move investment towards the package an

Intel has a lot of threats lately. Things seem to be moving towards a small die and MCM strategy to get better yields and move investment towards the package and FSB. AMD made a huge investment in that direction with Zen arch and Infinity Fabric - Threadripper's big package and high core count has opened a new tier of enthusiast desktops - and they may have plans for furthering that on the GPU side of things(Vega is positioned for efficiency at lower wattage, which is poorly reflected in the "hot-and-loud" flagship releases. It's expected to pair well with Zen in the forthcoming Raven Ridge APUs though.) Intel shares with Nvidia(also currently using large dies) a limited form of performance leadership at the high end that may be eroded in the face of these shifts. Most of the market is going to see more benefit from more cores instead of faster cores with the current conditions. That might be less true once we're talking about a baseline of 16 or 32 cores, but 2 is proving to be too few for current workloads. And that's just their nearest competitor. ARM SOCs have consumed the mobile market and are creeping upwards. My ARM Chromebook makes a pretty good Linux desktop too, and you can practically trip over RaspPi devices.