Yeah, it feels like Intel is sort of in the Pentium 4 days again, but without the Core microarchitecture sitting in the wings, and way more well funded competit

Yeah, it feels like Intel is sort of in the Pentium 4 days again, but without the Core microarchitecture sitting in the wings, and way more well funded competition - not just AMD. It's hard to see what they can do. AMD is winning on every measure I can see on x86, and M1/Ampere feel like a huge curveball thrown at them. I don't even think they could switch to using TSMC fabs to help them shrink the process size as all the capacity is booked up for years (especially by Apple). I think also the dynamics have changed in the server market in the last 10 years or so. You now have a much more condensed market with this big cloud operators buying millions of CPUs and having much more leverage over them before. I would be surpised if by the end of the 2020s if ARM wasn't standard in nearly all server workloads. Most software can run on it unmodified now - databases all work great on ARM, and most applications are interpreted or run on a VM, so it is pretty easy to move to.