I don't know anything about the impact Intel's status as a publicly traded companies could have on the distribution of this market (which maybe why I missed the

I don't know anything about the impact Intel's status as a publicly traded companies could have on the distribution of this market (which maybe why I missed the point), but semiconductor factories at Intel's level are insanely valuable. Intel also seems to learn very well from their expensive mistakes so with the equity in the factories and their existing market share, there is a long long way before Intel is truly "Oh shit we're going to go bankrupt really soon" threatened. ARM processors don't have an FSB (at least not in the sense that I understand it). Even if ARM-64 introduced one, what innovation can they do there? The whole point of QuickPath Interconnect and HyperTransport was that the FSB to Northbridge connection was a bottleneck. If you mean ARM can innovate in their general bus architecture, like implementing NUMA and a few other optimizations which would really help, then I agree. But we have yet to see how these optimizations will help in the ARM architecture and implementing many of them is nontrivial. I totally agree that this is a different threat and that's exactly why I think Intel will win this. Their response has been late but very promising and, from my cursory knowledge of their history, taken very seriously compared to previous threats. As for "other folks can see that now," the opinions I've heard in my circles have all been largely pro-ARM except for the electrical engineers. None of them think that any of the ARM microarchitectures can compare to Intel's for servers (opinions gathered pre-SnapDragon 800) and that they're nowhere near ready to impact Intel's market share in servers beyond a rounding error.