According to the article, back in the 1990s DEC was forced out of business because they underestimated the imapact that PCs would later make on the market, leaving Intel as a leader.
In the 2000s smartphones and mobile devices outnumber PCs. Intel missed that and so ARM dominates the business.
Maybe that same pattern will repeat again with the rising of IoT and wearables, where smaller and cheaper chips become ubiquitous.
The development of Edison and Curie processors might indicate that Intel is betting on this, gearing up for the next "disruptive innovation".
In which case we should all buy shares in Broadcom and learn to program Raspberry Pis.
Or possibly more likely - the next transition which will be much messier, with no single winner.
The mainframe -> mini -> desktop -> laptop -> mobile -> SBC path was about miniaturisation. The devices all provide general computing facilities, but they get smaller and faster and use less power, while the UI becomes more accessible to non-expert users.
I'm not seeing how that translates into wearables, because IoT and wearables aren't general purpose computing devices. They're more like embedded hardware and/or thin network clients.
So I don't think that's where the disruption will happen. It's maybe more likely the disruption will happen in consumer AI, where the UI gets simpler still through speech recognition and NLP, and the screen/mouse/keyboard start to disappear.
My guess is traditional processors will become front-ends and glue for hardware AI systems, and the companies to bet on are the ones producing the subsystems. The hardware will follow the same path as general purpose processors, but they'll move from "mainframe" to "SBC" much more quickly.
In the 2000s smartphones and mobile devices outnumber PCs. Intel missed that and so ARM dominates the business.
Maybe that same pattern will repeat again with the rising of IoT and wearables, where smaller and cheaper chips become ubiquitous.
The development of Edison and Curie processors might indicate that Intel is betting on this, gearing up for the next "disruptive innovation".