Re: Hindsight strikes again
Agree
Intel played a part in the hardware makers demise in that it has moved more of the PC infrastructure onto the CPU which has left less and less room for the server manufacturers to innovate.
And the larger CPU picture changed from being a straight speed race to spreading load across more cores leading to smaller performance increases for when hardware was upgraded and making virtual machines a more attractive way of using CPU resources.
Add in the economic picture, where the x86 market got the first round of decent multi-cores in the 2-3 years leading up to the crash in 2008, which extended hardware life cycles and people found they could cope with an old PC or do more on mobile devices, the good times for x86 vendors were over.
For the large data centre operators, I would have expected Google/Amazon/Microsoft to have more impact than Facebook. Facebook would be part of it, but the big three would contribute significantly more.