[citation][nom]InvalidError[/nom]Intel still needs to compete against itself (and a plethora of ARM-based devices) if it wants to continue selling chips. If they stop improving enough to give people a convincing sales pitch, nobody will bother upgrading anymore and Intel's PC-centric revenues will crash.Regardless of what happens to AMD, Intel still needs to keep moving forward if they do not want to risk a market take-over by ARM64/Android later in the office and HTPC markets.[/citation]
Not sure where you got your business education from but there's that old saying that "competition breeds innovation." Do you honestly think Silicon Valley would be a large community of R&D and tech companies relentlessly trying to outdo each other in terms of innovation if there was only 1 company there? The lack of competition invites complacency.
The reason Intel dumped Netburst was because they realized the Pentium 4 (and its similar Pentium D) architecture had become ridiculously antequated and simply raising the clock speed was not only yielding marginal performance increases but operating temperature was getting out of control hot. At the same time, Intel realized AMD was outgunning them by providing cheaper CPU's that run almost as fast, if not faster and cooler, than their P4 and PD's chips and had to go back to the drawing board.
Regarding the 486 days, I think that was the heyday of CPU's as there was no shortage of competition which included IBM (80XXX series), Motorola, (68000 series), Cyrix, NEC, Chips & Technologies, and of course AMD.