Now, I'm not even close to being able to weigh in on the physics side here... but my observation, as someone who has spent several hundred grand on servers in the last decade is that Intel is run by profit-maximizing professionals.<p>Look at how much better/faster/cheaper the intel stuff got after AMD's release of the hyper transport opteron.<p>and look at how much Intel tried to collect rent from their position of market dominance (say, by making us buy rambus and then FBDIMMs) before that.<p>AMD needs to step up their game.<p>There's another market force at work, too, and that is demand. On the consumer side of things, at least, there isn't any need for faster x86 computers, because Microsoft isn't doing it's job. It used to be that every three years, Microsoft would release another office suite that everyone needed, that ran like a dog if your computer was more than a year or two old.<p>I just upgraded my games box, a decade-old core2duo, to windows 10. Works fine (modulo spyware bullshit) - Microsoft has been focusing on the "mobile" market and has been putting a lot of effort into slimming down.<p>That, and (and I'm so shocked to say this) but it turns out that the people crowing about 'mobile is the future' were mostly right. When I was in high school, even my poor friends had desktops. Now, I know a <i>lot</i> of people, even technical people who only have laptops... and a lot of the people I went to high school with got rid of their desktops and now only have cellphones and tablets; nothing with a full keyboard and intel CPU at all.<p>If that trend continues, I would predict that we'll eventually switch our servers to whatever architecture the mobile devices use. AMD and Cavium and a handful of other companies have been talking about doing that with ARM, but so far there's nothing I can buy except at engineering sample prices.