One of the funny things about the Intel/Arm situation is that in many ways, it mirrors how Intel itself started out on low-end microcontrollers and microprocessors for PCs, and grew to displace pretty much everyone else for the high end supercomputers, data centers, and the like. For many years, it has been fairly apparent that the same thing was happening with Arm; when Arm thoroughly cemented its position on top of the smartphone market, it seemed pretty clear that they would eventually be able to push up into the laptop market and beyond, the main question was when.
Unfortunately for Intel, they've been hit by a couple of major blows in quick succession; Spectre and other microarchitectural vulnerabilities, and the fact that the mitigations wiped out a lot of their architectural advantages, their trouble with manufacturing at new process nodes, allowing AMD to take the lead from them on high-performance x86, and Arm finally catching up with them in the desktop/laptop space, and also starting to make some small inroads in the server space (though mostly on cost, not performance at the moment).
One thing which may have made them more susceptible to the innovators dilemma problem is the fact that they were already a victim of the second system effect with their Itanium failure. They poured a lot of resources into a major new ISA, and it was a flop and was replaced by the incremental x86-64. Despite that, their incremental improvements on the x86 architecture managed to wipe out all of the RISC competitors on the high end; so there's probably even more organizational oppositions to major new architectural changes which could have kept Arm at bay.
I think it's interesting that it has taken this long for RISC to really pay off. The whole idea behind RISC was to optimize the ISA for modern, pipelined, OoO architectures, but it turns out that for a long time, a bit of extra complexity in the instruction decoder wasn't that much of a price to pay, and things like Moore's law and other architectural improvements kept it mostly irrelevant as a competitive advantage.
But finally, Intel has run out of running room on process dominance, and other things have happened like hitting more power limits and software that's able to take advantage of more available threads and relaxed memory models. Once you start to try to run more threads, the extra cost and complexity of those decoders starts to add up, and the strong memory ordering constraints mean that your hands are a bit more tied on huge OoO dispatch.
Anyhow, Intel is still the biggest semiconductor company in the world, and they have weathered other major issues like the famous Pentium floating point bug, Itanium, and Spectre. It will take a lot to dethrone them, and with their revenue and market share, they can lose a lot of battles and invest a lot of money into new technology or companies before they lose the war.
But the last few years make it clear that they need some big wins soon, or they risk turning into the next IBM, slowly losing relevance as they milk their cash cows while the world moves on.
Unfortunately for Intel, they've been hit by a couple of major blows in quick succession; Spectre and other microarchitectural vulnerabilities, and the fact that the mitigations wiped out a lot of their architectural advantages, their trouble with manufacturing at new process nodes, allowing AMD to take the lead from them on high-performance x86, and Arm finally catching up with them in the desktop/laptop space, and also starting to make some small inroads in the server space (though mostly on cost, not performance at the moment).
One thing which may have made them more susceptible to the innovators dilemma problem is the fact that they were already a victim of the second system effect with their Itanium failure. They poured a lot of resources into a major new ISA, and it was a flop and was replaced by the incremental x86-64. Despite that, their incremental improvements on the x86 architecture managed to wipe out all of the RISC competitors on the high end; so there's probably even more organizational oppositions to major new architectural changes which could have kept Arm at bay.
I think it's interesting that it has taken this long for RISC to really pay off. The whole idea behind RISC was to optimize the ISA for modern, pipelined, OoO architectures, but it turns out that for a long time, a bit of extra complexity in the instruction decoder wasn't that much of a price to pay, and things like Moore's law and other architectural improvements kept it mostly irrelevant as a competitive advantage.
But finally, Intel has run out of running room on process dominance, and other things have happened like hitting more power limits and software that's able to take advantage of more available threads and relaxed memory models. Once you start to try to run more threads, the extra cost and complexity of those decoders starts to add up, and the strong memory ordering constraints mean that your hands are a bit more tied on huge OoO dispatch.
Anyhow, Intel is still the biggest semiconductor company in the world, and they have weathered other major issues like the famous Pentium floating point bug, Itanium, and Spectre. It will take a lot to dethrone them, and with their revenue and market share, they can lose a lot of battles and invest a lot of money into new technology or companies before they lose the war.
But the last few years make it clear that they need some big wins soon, or they risk turning into the next IBM, slowly losing relevance as they milk their cash cows while the world moves on.