The likelihood of Intel moving to ARM is probably nil. They have enough software to drag whatever ISA they choose with them, whereas AMD bringing up an ARM core could be fairly herculean as they have to convince their customers to not only buy their new chip but also trust AMD with a bunch of either missing or brand new software.

The days when Intel could single handedly successfully introduce a new (incompatible) ISA are long gone (if it ever could). I expect they will stick with x86 for as long as possible.

> The days when Intel could single handedly successfully introduce a new (incompatible) ISA are long gone (if it ever could).

Given itanium, I'd say they never could (although that could have been a fluke of that specific design)

Itanium underdelivered on performance both in its native mode and in x86 emulation mode. Either of them could have tanked that design by themselves, but both applied.

Indeed and that was with HP.

Look long enough back and you have iAPX 432!

There was also the three way ISA battle at Intel: 486 vs 860 vs 960. In the end they decided that legacy software was too valuable and redefined the 860 as a graphics co-processor and the 960 as a intelligent DMA to keep people from building Unix computers with them

AMD has already done an ARM 8 core chip. Then abandoned it.

ISA changes require a long term investment and building up an ecosystem. Which were out of scope for AMD at the time.

I think the market has changed somewhat, and they don't have to do all the heavy lifting. Would be interesting to see what happens there.

They still have an architecture license I think.

Given that x86 still has an advantage on servers makes sense for them to push that for then time being. When the Arm ecosystem is fully established I can't imagine it would be that hard to introduce a new Arm CPU using the innovation they've brought to x86 (chiplets etc).