>Only the paranoid survive era Intel would be treating the receding x86 monopoly and rise of GPGPU as an existential threat.

Not really. GPGPU is not an existential threat to Intel, even now neither Nvidia or AMD are hurting Intel much. But TSMC is an existential threat, even with the recent rumours of splitting up Intel Fabs, it is all too late.

It's the two in combination that I believe to be an existential threat. nVidia is succeeding at entrenching CUDA as a standard, just as Intel's x86 grip is loosening and processors are becoming commodities.

This leaves nVidia in a great position to commoditize their compliments, offering high performance ARM CPUs (like Amazon is offering) for a tiny margin just to fuck with Intel. And it really would. Versions with nVidia GPUs in the cache hierarchy (HBM) are just the icing on the cake.

Intel smartly got out of the memory business because it didn't want to join a race to the bottom fabbing commodity transistors, but there's a good chance that's in their not so distant future.

And yeah, TSMC is a pretty big threat too... I was ignoring 10nm as part of this, because we don't have any data yet as to whether it represents a permanent shift in Intel's ability to compete on fabrication. I personally doubt that. But it is possible.

> They seem good at making immense amounts of cash from yesterday's defacto monopoly, not so much at setting up tomorrow's.

Well said.