Yes but back then they had someone who understood disruption much better (Andry Grove was friend with the author of Innovator's Dilemma) and they never had to change the x86 platform. They only had to create simpler chips on the same platform (Celeron, Atom, the initial laptop chips - forgot their name).

This time however, they need to change the whole platform, because the whole platform brings much bigger inefficiencies than ARM, and they won't be able to improve down that much, while ARM will improve fast at a steady pace.

The only solution is to buy a big ARM maker. To have a chance to dominate, they'd need to buy Qualcomm for Snapdragon, but they've just wasted 7 billion on an anti-virus...

But even if they do that, I'm unsure of their potential domination, as I believe in 2011 Nvidia will dominate the mobile market with its Tegra chips. That's because in 2011 the battle will be over who has the best GPU not CPU. The GPU is increasingly more important (accelerating the UI, the browser, Flash, supporting higher resolutions, gaming, etc)

The GPU is increasingly more important (accelerating the UI, the browser, Flash, supporting higher resolutions, gaming, etc)

Don't forget offloading computation from the CPU like voice/face/gesture recognition and number crunching (there must be some use for that in a cellphone). And OpenCL is already providing a hardware-independent abstraction layer for that.

Indeed - they are not dying anytime soon. See also this:

http://codingrelic.geekhold.com/2010/08/x86-vs-arm-mobile-cp...

for why ARM's technical advantages may be overblown.

Intel's x86 killed the RISC workstation with Windows compatibility and price per MIPS. Intel then matched and surpassed AMD on AMD64 counting on its own size and on the complexity of building a very fast 64-bit x86.

All factors, Windows compatibility excepted, are on ARM's side this time. Of course Intel has survived bad situations before, but this time I am not betting on them.

Which factors exactly on ARM's side?

I can think of only two:

1) Power usage on low end chips. ARM will be ahead of x86 on platforms below the smartphone for the foreseeable future, and on smartphones for another generation (2-3 years)

2) Manufactures can customize ARM to build SOCs. I can't see Intel allowing complete customization like that, but I'd expect them to ship some competitive SOCs themselves.

It's simpler for ARM to adopt performance enhancements that make the core more complex than for Intel to adopt simplifications that make their cores more power efficient without losing performance.