[anakanemison]

News like this worries me because I've always imagined the world's improvements in mass market technology being driven by competition between major players like Intel and AMD.

In other words, I'm afraid that the loss of competition for Intel will slow the approach of the future.

The other sources of competition that Intel faces might be strong enough to motivate it, but I'm not as familiar with the influences that, say, ARM chips and Apple's own CPU development have had on Intel.

[flyinglizard]

In desktop and servers, for about 5-6 years now Intel has mostly been in competition with itself. If it can't engineer faster parts, it can't get people to upgrade, which means no sales. I wouldn't worry about that too much.

[CamperBob2]

Intel has mostly been in competition with itself.

This is more true than you'd think, unless you know how Intel is organized and operated.

When someone from Intel visits your company to discuss future product directions and you sign an NDA, they give you some documents with scary-looking bright yellow "CONFIDENTIAL - DO NOT DUPLICATE" covers.

The thing is, though, they don't much care if you turn the document over to AMD, Samsung, or whoever. They might yell at you or sue you or take you off of their Christmas card list, but they'll get over it. What the program manager is absolutely terrified about is that another manager at Intel will hear about the project and knife it.

Intel is a Darwinian dystopia. When Andy Grove titled his book, "Only the Paranoid Survive," he wasn't joking around or being overdramatic. It's an interesting company, quite unlike any other I've ever heard about.