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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

Intel does not have a monopoly. The do have the best (i.e. fastest) processors for some applications. But having the best product in a market niche is not a monopoly.

AMD make instruction-compatible CPUs and other vendors make other computing architures (POWER, ARM, SPARC, etc.) that all compete with Intel.

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Regardless of comparative product quality, AMD does not have access to the fab capacity to compete with more than 10-20% of the volume of CPUs that intel ships. AMD is the only other x86 competitor which, for the time being, are not easily replaceable for a large swath of the market (eg desktop and server cpus). AMD can threaten Intel’s margins, or up to 20% of their volume, but otherwise intel is monopolistic to a significant degree.

Is that capacity only from global foundries ? What about tsmc ?

As of right now, AMD only designs their CPUs to work on the GloFo foundry. They could relatively easily expand production to the samsung fabs (as those are using almost the same process), but moving to use TSMC would require expensive and time-consuming redesign.

I think 99%, 90% and 88% market share count as a monopoly

"Intel has more than 99 percent market share in servers, and its chips are in more than 90 percent of laptops and 88 percent of desktops sold."[1]

1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-09/microsoft...

Depends on what your definition of computing is.

Are you going to say that Apple has a monopoly on all iPhones? Or are you going to take the more reasonable stance and realize that the iPhone / iPad is a competitor to Desktops / Laptops.

We can define market monopoly by market application segments of computing: desktop computers, mobile devices (smartphones, tablets), servers, embedded systems, IoT devices, etc. It's pretty clear that Intel holds nearly total monopoly in desktop and server segments.

I can imagine that this monopoly is close to being natural[1] (thus, legitimate and legal), one should be proved wrong to state otherwise. But I can't accept that an expensive, critically important, high-tech product turned out to be massively flawed, but the company (especially the monopolist) behind it not only doesn't bear responsibility, but generally denies the existence of the technical flaw ("it's not a bug, but a feature").

Moreover, it's still unclear whether this bug will be fixed at all[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/22/linus-torvalds-declares-in...

Not in reality in the corporate space. Maybe AMD has a chance in commercial unless this destroys Intel but probably won't. Intel is the only x86 cpu I've seen my customers not have issues with. People are moving off power and sparc to x86 because of costs. These costs are not initial purchase but more of operations and maintenance. Applications are being less and less supported on non-x86 architecture. Arm is great but have not seen much movement into corporate. For x86, AMD has had stability issues for years running enterprise apps. I have made a lot of money troubleshooting issues for customers only to find out it's an execution bug on AMD. A lot of new software companies only support Intel cpu's as well. Why pay for making an HCL on two separate architectures when you really only need 1?

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