I understand ARM is not becoming a foundry (at least anytime soon, which I will explain in a second). First, I said they are becoming a chipmaker like Intel because they have two of three things to make chips- an architecture, and physical core IP (POP) https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-physical/pop-ip. They are making chips at all three foundries, but obviously don't own physical fabs. Softbank has 46 trillion in assets, with over 57.8 billion in operating income. What's stopping Softbank from making an offer to buy a majority stake in a Japanese foundry such as Rapidus (2nm) and other EUV equipment, such as Lasertec? https://semiwiki.com/forum/index.php?threads/shared-pain-sha... Ultimately, one starts to question, whether Qualcomms's interest in producing more consumer laptop chips is really competitive with the offerings by AMD and Intel, and whether this is really the best use of foundry space when foundries producing chips could be one day used against an amphibious assault on Formosa.

My point is that the commercial lawsuits between Qualcomm and ARM are just one part of a larger geopolitical issue- x86 lost the mobile market 20 years ago- the only reason Intel is surviving is national security- they could have been bankrupt had they not been propped up by a pre-emptive Defense Production Act. Consumers benefit because now they have the choice between more ARM software and x86 products, but I think that is just a short term benefit. Eventually the architecture cuts off support for old software, such as x86-32 bit, and now with X86S, they are only supporting 64 bit. So in the long term, it's better to have options. WINE was developed because of a fear of repeating the Irish Potato Famine ( a mono culture: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Importance-of-Wi...), in economic terms. In other words, just because Intel might not want to sell 32 bit chips anymore, doesn't mean others might not want/need to use some application that only exists on one platform (and all the engineers retired- with lost code/unported code).

There's an AI bubble: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-ai-bubble-is-looking-w... When a number of companies get investments and start to produce chips that add little extra value- slightly faster chips in lower power with 10 different architectures than run windows 11, then there is less justification to continue investing in companies that do not produce interesting new hardware because the end result is that they are being shaped by windows 11, rather than a unique feature- automotive efficiency for in car apps, sure, but laptops that run Oryon that are hard to boot linux aren't any more interesting than an x86S processor that can only boot linux 6.8 etc.