This article is rumormill clickbait (and likely complete bullshit), but it actually would be an incredibly smart thing for them to do, assuming they could keep

This article is rumormill clickbait (and likely complete bullshit), but it actually would be an incredibly smart thing for them to do, assuming they could keep the x86 licensing deal. The variable manufacturing cost of making chips is tiny...maybe $3-5 per x86 chip. The rest of the expense of production comes from amortizing the cost of design and plant setup...the majority of which is caused by the need for so many variants for the consumer segment. So if Microsoft dumped the consumer-focused CPU and GPU segments, they could drastically reduce the design and plant setup costs of production, probably by an order of magnitude or more. All they would need is their existing XBox chips, and a handful a handful of heavyweight server chips. With much lower design and plant setup costs, combined with extremely high volume production, it isn't hard to believe they can drive down the total cost per chip to $10-$20. And at those price levels, they could likely undercut the PS4 as well as all the other cloud vendors in their respective segments.