If Intel disappears, I imagine AMD will end up as the sole owner of the relevant Intel x86 patents during bankruptcy proceedings. Then AMD will then either negotiate a new agreement with someone else who wants to make x86 processors, or they end up having a monopoly on x86 and are forced to tread extremely lightly to avoid an antitrust lawsuit.

Part of what saved AMD was spinning off their fabs into a separate company. Besides the cash flow, they could focus on design and weren't hitched to what their own fabs could produce. They could choose the best fab contract they could afford.

Pat Gelsinger floated the idea of spinning off the fabs, but the US government shut it down as part of the deal for building new fabs with government money. The fabs that Intel may not even finish now.

Another factor for AMD was having their SoC in consoles. Kept some cash flow going when they desperately needed it. Intel doesn't have that benefit, either. AMD owns the PS5 and Xbox, while Nvidia has Nintendo. Steam Deck-like handhelds are a small but growing market, and all the ones people want to buy run AMD.

So the question comes up of what Intel can even do for cash flow. Their GPU division might start showing real profit in another generation, but they have to survive that long while taking a loss. One more uncompetitive generation of CPU releases will probably doom their core product, and the best they can hope for there is "not completely suck". The datacenter market was holding on because Intel has traditionally been rock solid stable, but that argument was killed with the 13th/14th gen overheating issues (which did affect equivalent server processors, as well). Their other hardware, like networking chipsets, comes with the same dark cloud looming over it, and it isn't enough to keep the company running, anyway.

Starting to see a lot of worried people as Intel descends downwards rapidly. Reminds me of Nokia how this is going...

It of course won't happen, but if Intel went poof next monday then what would happen to the x86 ecosystem. It's basically co-owned by AMD and Intel. As I recall the sharing partnership that these two have basically prevents neither guy from selling their patents/license to third parties. Would we just be left with AMD monopoly with intel's corpse hanging from it, until X86 finally croaks? Do these CPU licensing agreements prevent just wholesale acquisition of Intel?

We really need Intel to get their shit together.

Me, standing on the shore with a life raft next to me, watching Intel drown: ehhhh.. do we really, though...? They tried to cancel a contract with amd and sue them in an attempt to kill the company in its infancy; they bribed major OEMs when amd was first to market with a 1GHz chip, first to market with x64, trying again to kill the company, this time through starvation; then they sat on their ass for 15 years with essentially no progress, just collecting cash for the most minimal of improvements... I'm sure I'm forgetting a ton of other shit the company has done, playing dirty at every opportunity. It's been about a decade since I took a deep-dive into this.

I don't have a (monitary) horse in this race, but as this has progressed, with the side addition of their chips literally disintegrating, it's been very... enjoyable, validating, to have stuck with amd since finding out about all the bullshit intel has, would do, and continues to do, to try and control the market and remain in control, no matter the cost. Karma may, finally, have caught up with them.

We need every competitor in the cpu market. If AMD wins and destroys intel they will act the same way. We need another competitor in the GPU market as well.

What happened to all that money Biden gave them? Down the toilet? I don't know about you, but some motherfuckers got paid.

Starting to see a lot of worried people as Intel descends downwards rapidly. Reminds me of Nokia how this is going...

We need more competition in HW space tho

True. Hopefully Intel can work things out, but I don't think this strategy is it.

Companies as big as Intel don't typically go poof, they have bankruptcy proceedings and sell off their assets. If those assets contractually can't be sold, then yeah AMD would be the remaining owner.

I think someone would get those Intel X86 rights. However there may be questions on whether the rights from AMD like A64 are transferable. But if some company buys the entire Intel X86 division, I bet that counts as the patents remaining within the division that has the rights, although it is under different ownership. We recently had the Arm vs Qualcomm case that showed this can be allowed.
Anyways this might be disruptive, and the immediate effect would probably be that AMD X86 will be a lot more expensive.

Competition is fine, but just like the school bully, if I see him getting his ass handed to him, I'm stopping to watch, not to help. But I'm sure as hell going to enjoy the show.

Starting to see a lot of worried people as Intel descends downwards rapidly. Reminds me of Nokia how this is going...

Competition is fine, but just like the school bully, if I see him getting his ass handed to him, I'm stopping to watch, not to help. But I'm sure as hell going to enjoy the show.

Intel can stand to still lose a few pegs.

But after a bunch of beatings even a bully can become the underdog.

How do you fuck up so badly when you the largest share of the market? Like what?

In this case prioritizing „shareholder value“ above innovation and hitting engineering roadblocks while trying to catch up.

Starting to see a lot of worried people as Intel descends downwards rapidly. Reminds me of Nokia how this is going...