| I think Intel's dominance is troubled because of 3 companies: AMD, Nvidia and ARM. There are basically 4 market segments: Home Computers, Normal Office user, Small Office server and Large Scale Servers. The first 3 market segments can work well with a Pentium 4, let's even make it Dual Core processors (Not even Quad Cores). The Home computer segments doesn't seem to be growing and might not significatly grow in the future because Hand Held/Mobile devices are becoming more powerful and Home entertainment systems are becoming more of computers than their traditional role. Mobile devices and Home entertainment systems are normally refered to as embedded systems. ARM processors dominate these systems. Large scale servers vary. Picking from one of the example uses mentioned in the article, rendering is mentioned as one of the optimized applications. AMD was probably smart to acquire ATI because rendering nowdays is an issue of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) which is dominated by Nvidia and ATI. Therefore when it comes to graphics applications, CPUs are definately not as significant as GPUs. Nvidia has even gone ahead to have PPUs (Physics Processing Units). This further reduces the significance of CPUs. Still on the large servers, AMD cannot be ignored as it used to be. o_O!
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