Karl Rupp has a very good series of CPU and GPU performance comparisons, recently updated:
https://www.karlrupp.net/2013/06/cpu-gpu-and-mic-hardware-ch...
Most of the "no GPU benefit" stems from algorithms having low FLOPS per byte. Look up Collella's Seven Dwarves for more details.
And even if we assume GPUs become dominant, Intel is going to sell at least one Xeon for every two Teslas; those GPUs need host CPUs.
Hadoop/Spark/Storm etc. which rely on spinning up lots of JVMs could work nicely on this ARM platform especially given that most jobs involving iterating on rows of data which the JVM will automatically leverage vector extensions to speed up.
In the more "smaller" enterprise level HPC market NVIDIA is kinda ruling today, there is almost no point of building a traditional CPU based HPC platform if you are an enterprise (or even a small/medium size education/research institution).
Intel is trying to get into that business with it's Xeon SOC's and Xeon Phi compute hardware but I don't know how much traction they are getting, NVIDIA probably by now pretty much controls all of that market and Intel and AMD are more or less rounding errors.
ARM can really give NVIDIA a fight if they can provide semi-custom ASIC's for HPC you can easily shove 100's of cores into a single server making it potentially comparable to NVIDIA's HPC offerings.
NVIDIA is certainly ruling the roost because of CUDA+deep learning, but advantages in chips don't tend to last, and I do not see why this time would be any different. Could be a very interesting few years in the space.
Intel's real competitors are TSMC and GlobalFoundries, who are architecture agnostic. TSMC's market cap is ~90% of Intel's; GF are private, but they're probably in the same ballpark.
Intel is in a unique (and uniquely challenging) position as both an IP and fab company. This vertical integration has proved highly profitable for Intel, but it is also highly risky. Their recent decision to start manufacturing ARM chips points at this uncertain future - diversification is a high priority if they are to reliably recoup the costs of <10nm fabs.
The desktop market that Intel dominate is dying a slow death. Intel has failed miserably in the mobile market and are under threat on several fronts in the server and HPC market. x86 has been a tremendous asset for Intel, but it could easily become a hindrance. Intel is really two very different businesses (IP and fab) that are shackled together.
Intel is great but their current HPC/X86 offerings aren't that great. Xeon Phi and the Xeon SOC's might eventually come out swinging, but currently they aren't.
AMD on the GPU side is pretty stagnant it has almost no answer to the Tesla based servers, and on the software side NVIDIA's software stack which includes CUDA is simply better. On the CPU side we need to see where Zen leads, but even then AMD will have a competitor to the traditional Xeon platform rather than HPC.
ARM is probably more scalable especially since you can easily create semi-custom SOC's for HPC and put a lot of pretty powerful and considerably smaller cores in a server. Intel may get to that point with the Xeon products but it is not there yet.
If you go ask people working on car aerodynamics or geophysics or reservoir modelling for the oil industry, they're mostly all CPU cluster users still.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-16/intel-lice...
Tho that said Intel doesn't want to morph into a Fab as a service company, they just don't want to leave money on the table if they can't fill their 14nm and 10nm Fabs with their own IP/silicon they build it for some one else. It's even more so important now since Intel's dies are pretty darn big even as it comes to 14/10nm optimizing processes on smaller dies can be quite valuable to them. And considering they are dropping their "Tick Tock" methodology or at least altering it somewhat their Fabs can outrun their product line which is never good.
However, I expect Intel to try and shoot itself in its own foot in this business, for the same reason they killed Xscale previously. Because Intel is at a cross-point now (pun intended). They have to make a choice - either they "go big" with ARM chip manufacturing, or they try to protect the interests of the x86 division. They may put all sorts of caveats on ARM chip customers that want to buy Intel's manufacturing, so their chips can't compete directly with Intel's own x86 chips. But that will significantly hurt the potential of its ARM chip manufacturing business - so then may have to ask themselves, why are they even bothering with ARM chip manufacturing, if they're not going to go all-in on it?
So either Intel repeats its Xscale mistake by protecting the x86 chip business, and risks being completely left out of the mobile/IoT markets forever (in any capacity), while also losing a few more billions of dollars with this "ARM manufacturing experiment". Or it goes all-in with ARM chip manufacturing, manufacturing anything from IoT ARM chips to Xeon ARM competitors for anyone from MediaTek to Qualcomm, and then its x86 risks a severe decline over the next decade.
Either way, Intel has to make a choice. They can't have their cake and eat it, too, no matter how much they'd wish that to happen right now.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/05/01/microsemi-emerges-as-...
In fact one can argue about the brilliant move Intel made here, Intel opens up it's Fabs to 3rd parties, various companies including the leading FPGA designers jump onto it. 3-4 Years later Intel starts exploring integrating FPGAs into it's Xeon CPU's and SOCs, that's not coincidence when you fabricate something you have technology transfer even if it's completely "unintentional", furthermore Intel gains a lot of experience in fabricating and optimizing FPGAs silicon and they do it on some one else's dime while being paid heftily for it.
So I don't really think your conclusion of Intel's strategy is correct, Intel can very well keep the cake and eat it, Intel makes ARM CPUs and SOCs Intel gains experience and knowledge in producing and testing new silicon, Intel gains access to technologies that it could later implement in its own line of X86 CPUs to further optimize their microarchitecture for multiple cores, asymmetrical CPU designs, power efficiency etc.
So I don't see Intel being at a crossroads, they don't have to go big with ARM or go home, they just need to get enough ARM chips out the door to be profitable and considering Intel's fab efficiency it's not hard for them to do, and in the meantime gain enough knowledge and experience to improve their own IP and designs. Intel has made the bet once that I would take ARM just as long to get to X86 performance levels as it would take Intel to get X86 down to ARM's power levels and they made the right bet at the time, and I'm pretty sure they also made the right bet this time around also.
Of course, I don't want to sacrifice competition. It'd be awesome to see Intel and ARM competing in features, performance, power, and price on a simple target for compilers and programmers.
(Yes, I know as a practical matter x86-64 will never go away; it's simply that I like the direction the market is going.)
Don't know how "profitable" the HPC market at least nation-state level supercomputing is, at least directly. But the indirect gains from it, prestige, contacts, and technology transfer during the codevelopment process are likely to be quite huge.
If AMD actually hits Intel where it hurts with Zen and we don't get a Bulldozen at the end like we got with well Bulldozer; Intel might be up for a rough ride, especially if it's 3D Memory technology which seems to be now the "next big thing" at least as far as Intel's development goes doesn't pans out that well.