> Sure Intel and AMD may simply begin to sell whole finished SoCs. But what are these to contain? PC makers may have different ideas of what they should contain.
There used to be many competing CPUs with different instruction sets. I personally used z80*, 6502, 680xx, 80xx, Alpha, one from HP and who knows how many others. Add PowerPC and was Itanium a not x86 CPU? Then we almost standardized on one for a long time, plus ARM lately. No reason for we won't standardize on one SoC. It could be everybody buying only Apple computers (unlikely) or some company winning the forthcoming SoC wars. Or business as usual and stay on the current general purpose architecture forever, which is also unlikely given the optimization advantages of a SoC like the M1.
There used to be many competing CPUs with different instruction sets. I personally used z80*, 6502, 680xx, 80xx, Alpha, one from HP and who knows how many others. Add PowerPC and was Itanium a not x86 CPU? Then we almost standardized on one for a long time, plus ARM lately. No reason for we won't standardize on one SoC. It could be everybody buying only Apple computers (unlikely) or some company winning the forthcoming SoC wars. Or business as usual and stay on the current general purpose architecture forever, which is also unlikely given the optimization advantages of a SoC like the M1.