For years, the semiconductor world seemed to have settled into a quiet balance: Intel vanquished virtually all of the RISC processors in the server world, save IBM’s POWER line. Elsewhere AMD had self-destructed, making it pretty much an x86 world. And Nvidia, a late starter in the GPU space, previously mowed down all of it many competitors in the 1990s. Suddenly only ATI, now a part of AMD, remained. It boasted just half of Nvidia’s prior market share. On the newer mobile front, it looked to be a similar near-monopolistic story: ARM ruled the world. Intel tried mightily with the Atom processor, but the company met repeated rejection before finally giving up in 2015....read more >>