And we should be glad that they did or history may have turned out very different. I doubt that an Intel without any real competition would have innovated as quickly as they have.
It's a very interesting notion, that we'll never get to test unfortunately.
Without the artificially propped-up AMD perhaps the market would have served up a far superior competitor than a half-the-time mediocre AMD that is now on life support.
ARM is tremendous evidence that the market can produce competition to beat Intel. I think the ARM model is kind of like how Windows & Android both managed to beat Apple in market share, in regards to the business model (ARM being distributed amongst numerous competitors, advancing the market faster than it would with a solo supplier).
It's also worth considering that it nearly always takes a new epoch / inflection / radical shift in markets to dislodge industry standards (and that as a consequence AMD may never have stood a real chance). Which is also why ARM now has a chance to rock Intel.
I'm not aware of too many standards that have been killed off in tech without a big shift in the underlying technology segment in question.
