> looks less and less like the right choice with every passing month

It does seem like for at least the last 3-5 years it's been pretty clear that Intel x86 was optimizing for the wrong target / a shrinking market.

HPC increasingly doesn't care about single core/thread performance and is increasingly GPU centric.

Anything that cares about efficiency/heat (basically all consumer now - mobile, tablet, laptop, even small desktop) has gone ARM/RISC.

Datacenter market is increasingly run by hyperscalers doing their own chip designs or using AMD for cost reasons.

It seems impossible that CPUs could ever catch up to GPUs, for the things that GPUs are really good at.

I dunno. I sort of like all the vector extensions we’ve gotten on the CPU side as they chase that dream. But I do wonder if Intel would have been better off just monomaniacally focusing on single-threaded performance, with the expectation that their chips should double down on their strength, rather than trying to attack where Nvidia is strong.