This does not seem orderly/planned enough to be simple age-related.

I tend to agree. He's not outside the window where someone might choose to retire. But no named permanent successor? Retiring immediately? Tend to speak to a fairly sudden decision.

People who are presumably very well-off financially can retire a tad on the early side for all sorts of reasons or a combination thereof. Certainly he has made some significant course corrections at Intel but the most charitable thing one can say is that they will take a long time to play out. As you say, a merger with AMD seems like a non-starter for a variety of reasons.

> If A-tel (Amd-inTEL) can not sell to the EU the merger will not happen.

What the EU gonna do then? Stop buying computers? Perform rapid continental ARM transition for mythical amount of money?

Just stop buying new intel chips, and continue buying Arm chips. Its not like every single existing x86 CPU would need to be taken away and destroyed.

Apple has made it fairly obvious, even if it was not already with smartphones and chromebooks, that Arm is a viable, realistic, and battle-tested alternative for general purpose computing. Windows 11 even runs on Arm already.

It would not happen "tomorrow" - this would be years in court if nothing else. This would give Dell/HP/Lenovo/whoever plenty of time to start building Arm laptops & servers etc for the European market.

And who knows what RISC-V will look like in a few more years?

The EU has done a bunch of stupid anti-consumer shit in tech already (hello cookie warnings that everyone now ignores), so I would not be surprised if this happened.

Hard to imagine it ever coming to that but presumably massive fines?

> Perform rapid continental ARM transition for mythical amount of money?

And what is Intel + AMD going to do? Not sell CPUs in Europe?

> What the EU gonna do then?

Seize or terminate their patents and copyrights. Issue arrest warrants for criminal evasion. Compulsory licensing of x86 to a European design firm immunized by EU law.

> Perform rapid continental ARM transition

Yes.

Windows is on ARM. Apple is on ARM. AWS and Ampere make decent ARM servers. You have decent x86 user-space compatibility on ARM laptops. That is all users want.

I doubt it will cost 'mythical amounts of money'. Most users use a web browser and an office suite. I doubt they will know a difference for a while.

> Seize or terminate their patents and copyrights. Issue arrest warrants for criminal evasion. Compulsory licensing of x86 to a European design firm immunized by EU law.

My eyes rolled so far back I hurt myself.

Please provide some examples of where the EU has been able to do a fraction of what you listed to large, US based firms in the past.

Looking at the future, if you want a trade war and an excuse for the new US administration to completely neglect NATO obligations this is a great start.

> Please provide some examples of where the EU has been able to do a fraction of what you listed to large, US based firms in the past.

Provide an example of where a large firm decided to ignore EU law and go ahead with a merger that the EU objected to.

No-one wants the nuclear option, on either side. But if anyone ever tries to call the EU's bluff, they may find out the EU wasn't bluffing at all.