Qualcomm sell chips to more diverse uses than Intel do.
If Apple’s opened the gateway on them finally cracking into the desktop/laptop market by removing the stigma of their previous arm offerings, then I’d argue they’re very serious competition to Intel.
The only market I don’t see them tackling is consumer sales of just the chips, but that’s honestly such a small percent of sales to begin with for these companies.
The market on cpus is dominated by cloud sales. Desktop and laptop cpus are just such small business in comparison to everything else it seems anymore.
And in the cloud, custom arm seems to be the path that was chosen
More and more of AWS is available to run on Graviton. It can often be cheaper to use the Graviton instances when possible. And why not, when all you're caring about is having a PostgreSQL RDS instance or OpenSearch or an Athena query, it doesn't really make much difference if its an Intel or AMD or Graviton CPU under the hood so long as the performance per dollar is right.
Microsoft And Google have had Ampere-based CPUs available for over a year. They're still very x86 heavy though.
And don't forget, if you're really craving PowerPC in the cloud you can get LPARs on IBM's cloud for another flavor of non-x86 cloud compute.
