(This version of the graph is pretty old, but it's enough to get the flavor. The rate of new installations is still increasing exponentially, and the IEA continues to predict that it'll level off any day now...)
(It’s hard to harvest more power from a star than a Dyson sphere is capable of)
So, yeah, in a few years they'll be right. Even if for just a short time while the rest of the economy grows to keep up with the change.
an AMD alternative wasn't even a blip on the radar
I'm well aware of Opteron's impact. In fact, the event when that info was related to me, was partly held for me to scare the hell out of Intel sales folks. But 64-bit wasn't really part of the equation. Long time ago and not really disposed to dig into timelines. But multi-core was an issue for Intel before they were forced to respond with Yamhill to AMD's 64-bit extensions to x86.
That's one way to explain it. Alternatively, one might say that FSB-based Netburst servers would not benefit much from multi-core because the architecture (and especially FSB) has hit its limitation. Arguably, Intel had no competitive product on the mass server market until 2006 and Core-based Xeon 5100 introduction. Only enormous market inertia has kept them afloat.
> In the 64-bit server space, which is really what's relevant to this discussion, AMD was pretty much not part of the discussion until Dell (might have been Compaq at the time) and Sun picked them up as a supplier in the fairly late 2000s.
That was one relatively small (servers number-wise) segment of the market. Introduction of Opteron servers and Windows Server 2003 64-bit has created a new segment of mass 64-bit servers which have very quickly taken over entire 32-bit (at that time) mass server market. That was the real market that Intel wanted for themselves with introduction of proprietary Itanium but failed to acquire it because of the compatibility issue. High-end mainframe-adjacent market segment indeed belonged to Itanium for many years after, but that wasn't the goal of Itanium. Intel wanted to be a monopoly on the entire PC&server market with no cross-licensing agreements but failed and had to cross-license AMD64 instead.
I don’t know what factors would make IEA underestimate solar adoption.
The IEA is an energy industry group from back in the days where "energy" primarily meant fossil fuels (i.e. the 1970s), and they've never entirely gotten away from that mentality.
Remember all the conspiracy theories about how someone invented a free energy machine and the government had to cover it up? Well they're actually true - with the caveat that the free energy machine only works in direct sunlight.
Something I ponder from time to time, while trying to figure out how to be less of a cynic and more of a leader.
Explain Amazon, Uber, Spotify, Tesla, and other publicly listed businesses that had low or even negative profit margins for many years.
The idea that Wall Street only rewards short term profit margins is laughable considering who is at the top of the market cap rankings.