Re: Low bus factor
I think if AMD’s x86 offering weren’t well received, AMD would have continued down the ARM path. But with Zen selling like hotcakes, especially Zen 3 and onwards, AMD must have decided to stay in their x86 lane, where competiton is basically Intel and VIA, rather than enter the ARM fray, where competition is everyone in the tech space that can afford a CPU design team.
I think AMD will pivot to ARM or some other architecture if ARM or RISC-V manage to do to x86 what x86 did to MIPS, POWER, Alpha, SPARC, etc. But right now? They’re making maximum revenue off of x86 while it still retains advantages in the datacentre.