Intel is so dominant that they can sell their server processors for many thousands of dollars and still command the vast majority of the server market. I don't think any other CPUs have the number of SIMD units they have either.
Intel has also already made a lower power more core architecture with the Xeon Phi. It even has high bandwidth memory separate from main memory. The Xeon Phi is niche, but so are many core ARM servers. The point being that Intel is far from unprepared in this area and companies making many core ARM servers are going to have to do a lot to prompt a switch.
Isn't Xeon phi dead? There haven't been any updates since 2013. My one professor who worked on them said they have many issues from being passively cooled to requiring the Intel compiler to get halfway decent performance.
That 2013 date is a bit misleading. Although the most recent generation was announced that year, it did not ship until 2016, and the Knights Mill derivative launched just a few months ago.
Knights Hill was canceled. I hadn't heard anything about the entire line being killed, although it would not be totally surprising if that were to happen.
Intel's market segmentation is getting even more aggressive, which gives them future flexibility to address pricing in a very fine-grained manner.
Notice that they make you pay up for 2 AVX-512 modules per core: Xeon Gold 6xxx has them, and 5xxx only has 1 per core. Huge price jump to get those extra SIMD units.
There aren't nearly enough different parts for ARM to credibly threaten Intel at this moment. Also, with Intel's profit margins, they can substantially reduce prices to remain competitive in all but the most price-sensitive segments.
What the future holds, however, is different. We see we are (finally!) getting over the binary compatibility problem and we are now able to use more or less the same software recompiled and tuned for different architectures (POWER, ARM, Intel, AMD) that cover a vast space in the price/performance/watt space, much larger than any single vendor could before.
I can't wait to see people becoming creative again with hardware.
It was easier to be more creative with hardware in the past, because of the full stack experience.
Now that OSes and bytecode as portable binaires have become commodity it is very hard to try to sell something where users can just leave at any moment.
> It was easier to be more creative with hardware in the past
In the early 70s, perhaps. Then being compatible with DOS and then Windows limited most computers to x86 processors. One of the niches that was not limited gives us some hints of what can be now: Unix workstations that employed Motorola and RISC processors and all sorts of creative hardware to get a performance edge over what Intel could offer. They didn't need to reinvent the wheel and licensed large amounts of code to make the core of their OSs. They sometimes needed to port the C compiler to their architecture, but that was not the norm.
Developing for them was often making small changes to headers and recompiling the same source.
And then they died, because that C code could run anywhere regardless of the hardware improvements they were offering to the world.
This is what I meant with having nothing that could prevent developers to go away from the platform, just the performance edge wasn't good enough against commodity hardware.
When commodity hardware got "good enough" no workstation manufacturer could any longer ask for the large premiums they did when a PC couldn't touch their performance. A 386 was not good enough. A 486 was almost there and a Pentium was quite enough I didn't feel constrained when running Solaris 2.5 for development with a 20" monitor and reasonable graphics. Now I'm comfortable with x86's running different flavors of Unix and use both macOS and Linux almost interchangeably.
Yet, if someone could offer radically better price/performance than a x86 PC and still run the large software base that runs on x86 Linux machines, it'd stand a much better chance than it'd in the 90's and 2000's.
Intel is so dominant that they can sell their server processors for many thousands of dollars and still command the vast majority of the server market. I don't think any other CPUs have the number of SIMD units they have either.
Intel has also already made a lower power more core architecture with the Xeon Phi. It even has high bandwidth memory separate from main memory. The Xeon Phi is niche, but so are many core ARM servers. The point being that Intel is far from unprepared in this area and companies making many core ARM servers are going to have to do a lot to prompt a switch.