I disagree with a few of the points made by this article. "By 1986... Intel was already the best microprocessor design company in the world. They just needed t

I disagree with a few of the points made by this article. "By 1986... Intel was already the best microprocessor design company in the world. They just needed to accept and embrace their destiny." ...they were most certainly not the best design. SPARC was just about ready to murder the VAX at this point, and more importantly, both the first MIPS and ARM samples were delivered in 1985. Either would have trounced an i386. The iPhone was also discussed. We should remember that Intel got StrongARM from Digital, later selling the Xscale architecture to Marvel. The destructive debris of ARM within Intel was likely substantial enough to have delivered whatever Steve Jobs wanted. However, Apple would not be happy with 32-bit ARM for long, and Intel should have realized that. If Intel had presented the equivalent of AArch64 to Apple a year before the iPhone, meeting power and code-density requirements with newly-designed 16- and 32-bit equivalents of THUMB within a 64-bit architecture, Apple might have abandoned ARM. Intel and HP shared Itanic - had Intel and Apple shared something like the A7, history would be quite different.