AMD lived for years in Intel's shadow and barely scraped by, surviving only because they were willing to price their chips lower than Intel wanted to. Their success came only when Intel fumbled and, to their credit, the Athlon series of chips was in its prime. I'd argue they were only successful at that point because they were better and cheaper than the Intel chips at the time which were unusually under-performing and over-priced. They were only cheaper because they had years of experience in surviving at the bottom end of the market. They also marketed like their life depended on it.
ARM is something of an anomaly. They were as much as left for dead, with conventional wisdom thinking one of Motorola, IBM or even Intel would run them over like a bug on the road. That didn't come to pass because none of those companies ever seriously committed to building a modern but very low power CPU. They squeaked through a hole.
To credit NVidia with the success of 3Dfx is misleading. It was the Voodoo card that was marketed aggressively to consumers which, at the time, cared little for 3D performance. NVidia picked them up at a yard sale when they were run out of the market by more successful companies like ATI and, at the time, Matrox. It was NVidia's acquisition of 3Dfx that showed they were serious about the consumer market and not just ultra high-end applications. Making one GPU for both consumer and professional markets gave them the edge to remain competitive.
All three of these companies got lucky. They say you can engineer your own luck, and with that I can't disagree, but they never had a "better" product until the other guy dropped the ball or they could crack open a new market.
You mean cutting margins to survive while they didn't have the luxury of massive volume pricing? Isn't this exactly what you were arguing can not possibly happen?
> ARM is something of an anomaly. They were as much as left for dead, with conventional wisdom thinking one of Motorola, IBM or even Intel would run them over like a bug on the road.
Which architectures from each of those companies was in competition with ARM in its early days? I don't think that competition came till much later when ARM had already proven itself in the micro-controller market.
> To credit NVidia with the success of 3Dfx is misleading. It was the Voodoo card that was marketed aggressively to consumers which
Nvidia bought them because Nvidia created a part that performed on par or better than the 3Dfx part but also did 2D, which was a flat out revolution in the graphics card market.
> All three of these companies got lucky.
Sorry, that is just an incredibly egotistical comment to make.
They also had the advantage of not betting the house on Itanium or losing their shirt on the doomed Pentium 4 architecture.
In the early days, where ARM was used in the Newton and very little else. Motorola absolutely owned the market. If I was to bet on someone to unseat them I'd have gone with Hitachi and their SH series as used in the Dreamcast.
Like I said, they got lucky, but they also played smart when they did get lucky. Too many companies have been handed the opportunity of the century only to fumble it. It's a credit to each of them they went from underdog to player.
I still don't think this discounts how much money it takes to succeed. It takes a great company with a product that is at least good enough, not necessarily better.
But note that they haven't disrupted {lap,/desk}tops yet, despite having comparable power. The barrier isn't manufacturing scale but compatibility with x86's massive install-base of software. One way around this is an entirely new ecosystem, such as phones/tablets.
It'll be interesting to see if ARM can parlay their near stranglehold on the market now into further dominance into previously desktop-only domains, and possibly even servers.