> Once there get a leg up they will start adding patented operation to their stuff. And then we'll end up with a fragmented CPU field driven by corporate greed.

Why would they go out of their way to make it harder for devs to target their ecosystems?

Here's what I see happening: the majority of application development now takes place within architecture-agnostic languages/frameworks/platforms. The platforms solve the problem of multi-architecture once, and then everyone else can get on with their business without thinking about it. Fragmenting the hardware itself mainly serves to open the door for more finely-grained optimizations by these platforms (interpreters, browsers, LLVM, etc).

Look to graphics APIs for comparison: OpenGL was a relatively high-level API because that's what game devs and others were usually writing directly. Now that most game dev happens in engines like Unity and Unreal, or even on platforms like the Web, only the platform/engine developers have to write actual graphics code a lot of the time (excluding shaders). And they want more fine-grained control, so we're switching to lower-level graphics APIs like Metal and Vulcan because the needs for the baseline API have shifted.

So what I see is not a difference in the total fragmentation from the average dev's perspective, just a shifting of where the abstraction happens.