Thank you for saying this. It's clear that processors are going through something really interesting right now after an extended dwindling and choke point onto x86. This x86 dominance has lasted entire careers, but from a longer perspective we're simply seeing another cycle in ecosystem diversity, specialized functions spinning out of and back into unified packages, and a continued downward push from commoditization forces that are affecting the entire product chain from fab to ISA licensing. We're not quite at the wild-west of the late 80s and 90s, but something's in the air.

It seems almost like the forces that are pushing against these long-term trends are focused more on trying to figure out how to saturate existing compute on the high-end, and using that to justify drives away from diversity and vertical integrated cost/price reduction. But there are, long-term, not as many users who need to host this technology as there are users of things like phones and computers who need the benefits the long-term trends provide.

Intel has acted somewhat as a rock in a river, and the rest of the world is finding ways around them after having been dammed up for a bit.

I remember when I was a senior in undergrad (1993) the profs were quite excited about the price/performance of 486 computers which thoroughly trashed the SPARC-based Sun work stations that we'd transitioned to because Motorola rug-pulled the 68k. Sure we were impressed by the generation of RISC machines that came out around that time like SPARC, PA RISC, POWER PC and such but in retrospect it was not those RISC machines that were fast it was 68k that was dying, but x86 was keeping up.

> It wasn't till the early 2000s that both the desktop/server space coalesced around x86.

A lot of companies killed off their in-house architectures and hopped on the Itanium bandwagon. The main two exceptions were Sun and IBM.

The bandwagon was actually an Ice Cream truck run by the old lady from the Sponge Bob movie.

Intel had just wiped the floor with x86 servers, all the old guard Unix vendors with their own chips were hurting. Then Intel makes the rounds with a glorious plan of how they were going to own the server landscape for a decade or more. So in various states of defeat and grief much of the industry followed them. Planned or not, the resulting rug pull really screwed them over. The organs that operated those lines of businesses were fully removed. It worked too well, I am going to say it was on accident.

Intel should have broken up its internal x86 hegemony a long time ago, which they have been trying since the day it was invented. Like the 6502, it was just too successful for its own good. Only x86 also built up the Vatican around itself.