Not sure what you mean by held back, As far as we cant tell, ignoring all the JV and shares, this is basically AMD making their EPYC chip in TSMC specially for Chinese Market.
Yes, basically Chinese paid near $300m just for the right to put own label on it, and distribution rights.
Really? They have a decent MIPS story there, have had for a while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawning_Information_Industry#D...
They could literally have ignored x86, but they are making the same strategic blunder the UK made in the 1980s
It looks more like some kind of threat / showing off than a product that you can buy. Email and phone calls go unanswered regarding buying one of these.
Intel has done it with x86, IBM have done it with POWER, AMD have done it with x86 (more or less independently to Intel), Sun/Oracle have done it with SPARC, Apple have done it with ARM and most recently it looks like ARM's Cortex A76 is joining the league.
All these designs look very similar, they are basically variatins on the same archtechure with different front ends.
Is there any reason to believe any other architure that tries to be, approximately, everything for everyone would fair any better?
Any architecture that wants to take a decent swing at replacing x86 will either have to be x86-compatible or do a good job at emulating it accurately and efficiently.
In mobile devices, ARM has an almost(?)-monopoly indeed, but x86 never was a serious contender in that space to begin with. The same goes for "IoT" devices. In new areas of computing, Intel is just one vendor among many (well, several), and the more the market tends to demand low-power chips, Intel's advantage melts away. In that sense, I agree with you. In HPC, I could see ARM become a serious alternative, because the trend seems to be to delegate the heavy lifting to GPUs, anyway, and the GPU does not care what kind of CPU feeds it, so to speak.
But in the traditional desktop area, if you cannot run Windows and the huge number of third-party applications available there, you might as well give up. And to completely "replace" x86/x64, you have to compete in the desktop market as well.