Intel sold 300-400 million chips in 2015. That year the number of ARM CPUs sold was 15 billion.
I find it hard to frame that as "ARM can't compete with Intel", especially since PCs aren't a lucrative market anymore. You want to be in mobile, IoT, etc., and Intel threw in the towel there a while ago.
I don't think anyone was saying ARM can't compete with Intel at all. ARM, can't currently, compete with Intel in the desktop and server space in the same verticals that Intel does. Show me an 18-core general purpose server grade cpu from ARM. OR a 4.4ghz 8 thread gaming cpu for desktops? My hope is that some vendor (possibly Apple) takes the ARM IP and makes a wide instruction general purpose desktop ARM cpu.
And until that happens my original point was: business software, operating systems, etc., have been written and / or optimized for the x86 platform so much so and said software is so pervasive that leaving x86 will take a revolution or a big player to push it, again maybe Apple.
ARM can win even if it doesn't have the capability to penetrate the PC market right now. As PC margins shrink more and more, Intel's situation looks more and more precarious. Gaming CPUs are only a tiny sliver of the market, and one that is not nearly as profitable as mobile.
This is great for consumers, by the way: we're long overdue for healthy competition in the CPU market. ARM is not an open architecture, so it's not ideal, but at least the various licensees compete with each other, which is an improvement over what we have with Intel.
> And until that happens my original point was: business software, operating systems, etc., have been written and / or optimized for the x86 platform so much so and said software is so pervasive that leaving x86 will take a revolution or a big player to push, again maybe Apple.
The operating systems that matter are all ported to ARM. And perhaps the most important consumer OS today--Android--has virtually no x86 penetration. In 2017, looking at the overall market, ARM has the advantage in terms of software compatibility, not x86.
Oh yeah I had forgotten that point. Apple developers ship bytecode to the app store right? And then when it downloads it is specific to the phone or device, I think. Yeah that would make things a lot easier to move. So if Apple ever made another arch change like they did from PowerPC to x86 this could forgo the need for the RosettaStone translation stuff.
You bring up a good point. I think your hinting to the server space when you bring up the shrinking margins in the PC space. And the server space already has some shipping hardware so I think that's what might pose an existential threat to Intel
I find it hard to frame that as "ARM can't compete with Intel", especially since PCs aren't a lucrative market anymore. You want to be in mobile, IoT, etc., and Intel threw in the towel there a while ago.