[RI_Swamp_Yankee]

ARM is a very compeitive field of a number of manufacturers, building chips for billions of devices. The advantage is no longer Intel's. More, the Great Old Ones - IBM with their zSeries and Power8 and now Oracle with SPARC of all things, are making a play for the server racks again. They're trapped between the massive economies of scale ARM is enjoying at the low end, and improvements in lowering cost and increasing yield for small batches of fancy and performant chips by the big R&D houses at the fat-margined high end.

The middle of the road is shrinking fast.

[shortsightedsid]

Sun didn't fab the Sparc themselves and therefore it's unlikey that Oracle will. AFAIK they were fabbed in companies like TI. Source: TI's annual report from 2007 http://investor.ti.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1193125-07-424...

Therefore, Intel's competitive advantage of running their own fabs could keep them ahead in the server space as well.

[fra]

TSMC fabs the SPARC chips. Source: I worked on the SPARC systems, but this info is a quick google search away.