Modern times aren’t like the past.
Don’t get me wrong, the market will probably be worse if Intel were to go bust (certainly in the short term), but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as devastating as it would’ve been 10, 15, 20 years ago.
x86 isn’t the only viable architecture in town anymore.
Apple and others have proven that ARM is certainly viable for PCs.
Yes, Qualcomm’s X Elite was a complete dud, but that’s more on their/MS’s absolute shit show of driver/firmware/graphics API development, not on the hardware. Nvidia’s ARM stuff is already more mature.
Now imagine if Intel disappeared. AMD simply would not be able to meet the demand required, it’d tigger an arms race of companies pushing ARM and RISC-V development. Nvidia has not kept it secret that they want to get more into CPUs.
Shit, as unlikely as it initially seems, there’s so much money on the table that Apple could even consider selling SoCs (although even if they did, I imagine they’d retain the best for themselves, or charge a huge premium).
I don’t think people should be as worried about a lack of competition as they were when AMD was facing bankruptcy. The market is different now, and it’s in a state of fairly quick evolution.
It’ll probably be based on some silly WW2-era grudge, which I find stupid.
Or Dieselgate, which while awful, despite what the headlines would have you believe, the VW group was far from the only manufacturer with illegally high diesel emissions, in fact, they were far from being the worst.
There are of course other things, VW has started trying to get into the DLC for cars bullshit that others have, but IMO that pales in comparison to Elon’s bullshit or China literally using slave labour.
E: oops, there’s some transparency issues on that Wikipedia graph. Dark mode users may struggle. Here’s the link: Diesel Emissions Scandal