AMD being destroyed would be bad for innovation in the long term but in the medium term it could create a pattern where Intel only stays barely ahead because going *too far ahead is actually detrimental. Regulations should perhaps be changed so that monopolies are incentivized to innovate and create good value instead of holding back. For a good while there browsers (IE6) were complete crap because MS feared regulations. You can think of the same thing happening to all MS windows software, from paint to windows movie maker. If MS were allowed to make good software for low cost the benefits to society could be pretty large.
However, because MS was close to a monopoly everything they do was suspect. On the other hand modern day apple seems to profit immensely from being NOT a monopoly. By not having a monopoly in a single area they're allowed to vertically expand as much as they want. Imagine if apple weren't allowed to offer siri, or icloud, or facetime, or imessages? The vertical expansion turns out to be more profitable than horizontal domination while at the same time being as abusive as MS ever was.
With AMD gone we would all have been using some variation of Itanium by now, instead we got stuck with x86 because AMD found a workaround for 64 bit migration.
However, because MS was close to a monopoly everything they do was suspect. On the other hand modern day apple seems to profit immensely from being NOT a monopoly. By not having a monopoly in a single area they're allowed to vertically expand as much as they want. Imagine if apple weren't allowed to offer siri, or icloud, or facetime, or imessages? The vertical expansion turns out to be more profitable than horizontal domination while at the same time being as abusive as MS ever was.