Looking at your other replies your argument seems to boil down to “reasearch needs all the money in the world, consolidation helps with money”, but don’t really address where you think that money will come from, and for what value delivered.

The main concern voiced here is that Nvidia-Arm could get away will less research while earning more money.

That’s basically what happened when Wintel was at peak and there was no viable alternative to Intel chips. They didn’t bring incredible innovation from the ungodly amount of money they gained; they just crushed all their other competitors through various means, got sued, and still made the field plateau for a decade or so before we saw real innovation.

Isn’t it the actual state of play though? At more and more levels there are only one or two players — e.g., ASML, Samsung/TSMC, AMD/Intel, etc. There are lots of others around but they’ve written off cutting-edge business. That’s even though there are a number of exciting developments in hardware going on. I just think the barrier to entry has grown so large that it’s difficult to avoid.

Right now, regarding CPUs we have:

- Intel

- AMD

- Apple

- Qualcomm

Any of them is pushing the enveloppe in some way or form, I’d argue they are “cutting-edge”

Or others have bought into lassezfaire capitalism to such an extent that they think large companies are amoral entities and therefore get a free pass to do whatever the want and grow larger and larger engulfing and eliminating competition.