That's a general problem with large companies, they often can't afford to pivot and succeed in lower profit sectors, even if its clear that the high profit sectors are going to stagnate and shrink over time.
Exactly. What they typically do is acquire someone who can. In Intel's case I'd doubt they would acquire ARM because they would probably have to continue to license the technology to everyone else (I don't really know what I'm talking about here). However, they could acquire someone who has the "low power CPU technology" they would need to compete. If you think about who that someone could be nobody really comes to mind. Maybe they could buy back Marvell. Qualcomm, Samsung, TI are clearly out of the question.
> However, they could acquire someone who has the "low power CPU technology"
The other possibility is that Atom will slowly become more competitive. Weirdly, I think the most important thing for that would be a solid Android-on-x86 story, so device manufacturers don't have to do so much custom GUI work.
