Intel is Dead and x86 is Next (Premium)

The x86 instruction set that once defined personal computing is now a boat anchor holding back the PC industry and contributing to Intel's death. Intel is screwed, but we'll be OK. Microsoft and Qualcomm delivered a one-two punch on behalf of Arm in 2024, and in 2025, Nvidia and other chipmakers will arrive with the knockout blow that finishes off x86 once and for all.

This is what it's like to live in interesting times. We're in what's called an inflection point, and it is a matter of history that Intel's power was so vast, and its leadership so shortsighted, that the company kept x86 afloat artificially for many years longer than would have happened in an equitably regulated and truly competitive market. As comes up repeatedly in my ongoing history of Windows on Arm--Part 2 will be available soon--Intel illegally gamed the system for decades by paying PC makers to use its chips instead of those made by competitors, whether they were x86 licensees like AMD or companies using different architectures.

(And it's still doing it. Back in May, I wondered aloud about the impact of Qualcomm's latest PC-based Arm chips on Chromebooks, and was surprised when no Snapdragon X-based devices appeared. I learned why in September, when Intel announced the release of its "Lunar Lake" chips at IFA. If you watch the launch event, you'll notice something odd: Four minutes in, after discussing its advances in "Lunar Lake," Intel brings out its first partner. And it's not Lenovo, HP, Dell, or Microsoft. It's Google. And not just Google broadly: The vice president and general manager of Chrome OS and Education shows up to explain that Google has mysteriously chosen Intel over for Chromebooks and local AI. Curious.)

If dominant Big Tech monopolists have anything in common, and they do, it's that they sing the same tune: These companies don't need to be regulated, they argue, as unforeseen competition and market changes will always conspire to topple them in the end. But like all arguments against regulation, this stance is deeply flawed, in this case because it ignores the amount of time required for this disruption to occur, time during which the monopolist is free to continue contorting the market for its needs and, hopefully, finding ways to expand its dominance into new markets.

And so it was with Intel, which was so busy backing giant trucks full of money up to the headquarters of its PC maker partners that it lost the script. There are many ways to describe this period, but here's one of the more concise. After securing Apple as a customer in 2006 when it transitioned the Mac off Power PC, Intel then fumbled the future by delivering lackluster mobile chips that couldn't meet the needs of the PC market, let alone the iPhone and iPad that followed. Finally, Apple infamously jumped ship with the Mac as well, transitioning the Mac again in 2020, this time to the Arm architecture, leaving Intel--and x86--in the dust.

It was during this era--the r...