[citation][nom]ubercake[/nom]The trouble is... AMD really no longer competes.They almost need to break up Intel into smaller competing companies. They're heading toward an anti-trust.[/citation]
What? Monopolies are when there is a market leader that uses their market dominance to drive competition out of the market. Right now, Intel is anything BUT using its position to force adoption. ARM is making huge inroads into netbooks in the next few years, expect them on laptops as a commonplace occurrence when Windows 8 comes out.
The fact Intel is dominating the desktop mainstream is because we sold our souls to them in the 90s. We said, hey x86, we will design EVERYTHING for you. And we did. So today, to build a processor that can run that instruction set, you must license it from Intel. That is the real burden of modern computing, it is not that Intel dominates the desktop / laptop market, it is that we have written all of our software for x86 when it isn't an open standard so you can't expect much competition in the hardware space when Intel controls who can use it.
There is the flip side that Intel now has to license AMD64 instructions for 64 bit, but that is what is keeping AMD in the game. Even if they stop making processors, Intel is stuck licensing the AMD64 set from AMD because they used it at the 64 bit transition period and now it is too late to back on that.
But Intel is not a monopoly, and it is not a trust. You need to start worrying if Intel starts using its mass market control of mid to high range processors to force certain programs to stop running on a case by case basis.