While arm is catching up, there is no gaurentee that it will actually be competitive one day, not to mention beat it. Intel is still a beast and spends more in R&D than what amd took in last year. It would be foolhardy to write intel off.

This is a good move for ARM perhaps, since their licensees have (repeatedly, at least _for now_) failed to move into the server market where x86 reigns supreme, so if they can take a shrinking market off Intel's hands and make some inroads there, hey, whatever works. People actually don't care about processors, because for consumers, price is king. So if they can deliver cheaper Chromebooks or whatever, people are happy. And ARM already dominates the lower end market. But large players don't work that way.

EPYC has better pricing per-core (I say this as a very happy 1950X owner) but you're kidding yourself if large scale vendors who buy thousands of SKUs per year/quarter do anything but buy in bulk, on multi-year contracts, with extensive sales negotiations. They are far ahead as far as vendor validation/stability goes (my 1950X motherboard still has BIOS/IOMMU glitches that I'm waiting on updates for, this stuff just takes time). For the biggest customers, Intel customizes their SKUs directly to their requirements. That's a significant amount of integration with their partners that AMD is not going to match overnight. And even if they take away some of Intel's total-monopoly status in the DC, say 25%, which is a metric shitload, they've still got a hell of a lot of technology (in their foundries) to back themselves up, as well as a massive warchest. I wouldn't be surprised if Xeon margins were above 50%. You really think they can't drop some of that off and immediately tilt that ratio back around, while having tens of billions on hand for R&D anyway?

You live in a castle of sand if you think they're actually going anywhere anytime in like, the next 5-7 years. And I have many bridges to sell you, if you think "marketing" is their only advantage in this fight -- as opposed to their foundries, deep integration, near-total monopoly status in the only market that matters, their massive warchest, and huge R&D setup.

I honestly wonder if Intel actually wants people think that ARM Chromebooks are a threat to them or whatever. It means they can keep deluding themselves while Xeon sales and margins continue to skyrocket for cloud providers while everyone else chases pennies (except AMD, who are actually trying, and are absolutely not guaranteed to dominate by that alone)...

(I do hope they start feeling the pressure, of course. I'd love cheaper Xeons, personally. :)