[gnode]

Competition benefits the space. It lowers price of compute and advances technology. One party prevailing over the other for a significant length of time leads to monopoly economics and stagnation of the industry.

The context of recent news is that Intel has been dominant for many years, prices of processors have been high and growing, and performance improvements minimal. AMD is now offering cheaper and faster processors, which characterises a resurgence of competition in the desktop and server compute market. Ideally Intel will improve their offering in response, otherwise facing loss of the market to AMD, and further continue the competition. No impartial consumer should want either company to prevail, but AMD's present lead signals an end to Intel's dominant position.

Developers benefit directly from cheaper and more plentiful computing, but also indirectly as more applications and approaches become practical for their target platform. As devices become cheaper, the potential user base for an application becomes larger.