It's not that they're going away, it's that they are turning into a more commodity market. You used to have 5000-10000 enterprises buying high-margin Xeons. Every dentist office had 5-6 Xeon chips sold at high margin.
Now, a significant, growing chunk of the market is in AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. Those vendors get favorable terms and make it harder for Intel to segment the market to maximize profits. When Intel was calling on me a couple of years ago, they were pushing storage hard (ruler, etc), but I don't see OEMs embracing Intel branding as storage, and Samsung seems to be winning deals that I'm involved in.
> Every dentist office had 5-6 Xeon chips sold at high margin.
That's a great observation.
For instance, I recently worked on a project to provide services to insurance agents via the cloud.
To me, it was interesting because it offered a lot of value for an insurance agency. Basically the last thing an insurance agent wants to worry about is some server in a closet that has a Blue Screen of Death.
Now, a significant, growing chunk of the market is in AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. Those vendors get favorable terms and make it harder for Intel to segment the market to maximize profits. When Intel was calling on me a couple of years ago, they were pushing storage hard (ruler, etc), but I don't see OEMs embracing Intel branding as storage, and Samsung seems to be winning deals that I'm involved in.