Michael S (already5chosen.delete@this.yahoo.com) on January 29, 2013 6:09 am wrote:

> How competition from low-margin Qualcomm is different from competition from low-margin
> AMD server chips? Of from Intel's own medium-margin Xeon-E3 line?

AMD did in fact put a dent in Intel's server business when they had relatively
good throughput-per-dollar, plus innovations like better virtualization support.
But over the last few years their cores have been
too slow to match up, without offering the system-level advantages in
throughput-per-watt and throughput-per-1U-rack that ARM-based products are
likely to offer. And AMD's business model - sell something not quite as good
as Intel's product, for a bit less - is not at all like the hyper-competitive
ARM mobile-cpu business.

They also established a bad reputation for missing schedules and delivering
parts which didn't perform as predicted - again, competitors emerging from
the ARM mobile space have probably already learnt that lesson.

Competition from Intel's mid-range parts is definitely a factor, and that comes
down to Intel's internal decisions about whether they're willing to cannibalize
their own ultra-high-margin server cpu business before someone else eats it.
I could easily imagine that Intel might retain their 85% market share, but only
at much lower ASP and lower margin, if they're willing to accept that.

The one thing I can see that might change this would be for Intel to come up with
a much better main-memory technology (and I guess die-stacking might be a possibility):
but if everyone is stuck with the same DDR3/DDR4 standard, with the same number
of pins and the same effective-bandwidth-per-pin, then they're all going to be in
the same ballpark for server throughput, regardless of ISA and process-node
differences.