[roenxi]

Ease of entry into the market is much more important than the present market structure. An underdog can become the market leader in a year or two [0]. The issue with Intel/AMD is that there are only something like 4 legal entities out of >7 billion legal entities on earth who are licensed to produce x86 chips. 4 is better than 1, but it is still a low number.

It is nearly impossible to maintain an oligopoly in a market that is easy to enter and questions of underdog/overdog become irrelevant. All companies have to offer a reasonable (value/$) proposition to customers of they go broke.

[0] Poor Nokia - http://www.asymco.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Screen-Shot...

[wincy]

Is there a time in the future that x86 related patents will expire?

[Dylan16807]

Sure! For actual x86, they already have. You can make a perfectly good 32-bit chip with SSE2.

The patents on the core of x86_64 will expire in a couple years. Even if you can't have the more recent vector instructions, that's pretty good for a lot of use cases.

[nazgulnarsil]

each of those 4 entities has whole teams devoted to building up the warchest of patents + colluding on standards to keep the balls in the air indefinitely.