While Intel may be in trouble or so it would look by the press the reality is still far from. Check the profit last quarter :-O
Intel still have things going for them, I guess we need to wait and see how it all works out in the next year or so.
good for AMD to make some money, a healthy market as you point out is not a monopoly.
while ARM has not exactly set the server world on fire it also still has potential to cause some upsets in certain spaces
Full disclosure: I possibly read one too many of Charlie Demerjian's posts.
This that out of the way, I agree with OP. Intel shady shit tactics of covertly damaging AMD sales did come around bit them back.
I am 100% convinced that Intel current issues stem from a very long history of a) why to fix what is not broken b) why to spend money in R&D if no one else is competing with us and c) this is bigger engineering/design issue: Why to change our CPU design significantly then we could just slap new
magical instruction set (each word is a separate link)
As far as profits go: The vast majority of Intel "healthy" margins
come from sales of servers. Unlike desktops, this isn't a rapidly shifting market and AMD has still plenty of battles vs Intel to gain even a relatively small 10% cut of this hugely profitable market. Intel isn't sitting tight and Cascade Lake refresh price cuts shown that Intel will do price wars vs AMD. That said, at least according to Charlie's insiders, the rumor mill says that Intel can't sustain such drastic margin cuts for very long as their bloated organization and extremely cash needy process R&D could cause havoc into Intel war chest if it continues to sell Xeons to stay price competitive to AMD.