Perhaps it is simpler to say that Intel was disrupted
"In 2006 AMD (struggling) bought ATI for $5.4B. Intel just didn’t even notice. It was super weird."<p>I think this is the best line in the whole thing. Intel <i>didn't</i> notice, and it <i>was</i> super weird, and it was the best thing they ever did.<p>Fun fact: the first thing the engineers did with their new toy was bolt then-new R700 pipes to a hypertransport bus, so it used hypertransport to fulfill memory requests instead of a native Radeon GDDR controller.<p>The purchase of AMD and the Christmas morning giddiness of unwrapping that gift and turning it into what eventually became the prototype of the APU was the most brilliant thing ever.<p>To put it in perspective, lets count all x86 sales: all the desktops, all the laptops, all the servers, all the weird little things like x86 chinese tablets, all of it.<p>Combined Xbox One and PS4 sales (both massive APUs, essentially) dwarf all of the sales <i>both</i> Intel and non-console AMD do; it dwarfs it in per chip and per thread. Intel only claims more sales in dollars than AMD (incl. MS and Sony deals) because of Intel tax, no legitimate reason.<p>Similarly, lets do the same with Radeon sales vs Nvidia GPUs... take all of the Nvidia GPUs (desktop, laptop, ARM SoCs like the Shield and the Nintendo Switch, server compute, etc), and all the AMD GPUs that aren't XBOne and PS4... console sales dwarf everything else that both companies make.<p>AMD won both races and no one even paid attention: AMD makes more x86 CPUs (both per chip and per thread), and more GPUs. Optimizing performance software (ie, games) has far more focus on both of AMD's platforms than anything else.<p>Intel and Nvidia are now the underdogs in their own races. This happened silently, and the cheer-leading for Team Blue and Team Green drowned out reality for a bit.