Maybe not so implausible? AMD had a good run with the Athlon/K7 and the K8. The latter was so successful that Intel was forced to adopt its 64-bit ISA. The Pentium 4 (NetBurst) was a dead end design, and Intel had to backtrack and build off their laptop CPUs that were based on the older Pentium Pro design.
Apple bought P.A. Semi in 2008, a company founded by Daniel Dobberpuhl of DEC Alpha fame. Clearly they had something brewing on the CPU front.
> The Pentium 4 (NetBurst) was a dead end design, and Intel had to backtrack and build off their laptop CPUs that were based on the older Pentium Pro design.
Don't forget Itanium, Intel's other dead end architecture. It's actually kind of amazing that Intel recovered from both at the same time (for the most part).
In what way were they collecting monopoly rents? It seems like what happened was someone came out with a better product and took a bunch of their business. Isn't that exactly what monopolies are expected to prevent from happening, and, as I understand it, the reason they are considered so bad?
The Commission filed an administrative complaint against Intel Corp., the world’s leading computer chip maker, charging that the company had illegally used its dominant market position for a decade to stifle competition and strengthen its monopoly. The complaint alleged that Intel engaged in a course of conduct to shut out rivals’ competing microchips by cutting off their access to the marketplace. In particular, the complaint alleged that Intel unlawfully maintained its monopoly in relevant central processing unit, or CPU, markets, and sought to acquire a second monopoly in the relevant graphics markets, using a variety of unfair methods of competition. In August of 2010, Intel agreed to a settlement containing provisions that would undo the effects of Intel's past conduct, and prohibiting Intel from suppressing competition in the future.
Apple "clearly had something brewing on the CPU front" sure, they were just getting into the mobile phone industry; hearing that Apple would eventually make their own smartphone chips wouldn't have been surprising.
What might've been surprising is them getting into the big, high performance desktop-class CPU segment and leading the industry in efficiency and performance HEDT chips for desktops.
And Intel's relative irrelevance is certainly surprising, as is them losing the fab game to TSMC.
You should probably include Intel in that list, given that they acquired DEC's chip fabs in 1997[1], the lion's share of Alpha IP in 2001[2], and hundreds of Alpha engineers over the next few years[3].
Really? IIRC the PPC970 (you could definitely debate to what extent this was Apple vs IBM, of course) and Athlon64 both handily beat Intel's stuff when they launched ~2003; it's just that they failed to maintain that lead.
