Anyone?
...

Thought not.

Maybe next time.
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The market sector has been changing for years, and to some extent the desktop market has now reached saturation point. Notebooks might still be growing, but mostly by dividing into different areas; replacement desktops down to palmtops, and the Mainframe is back;) well sort of - desktops are hardly dumb terminals, but most of the massive companies out there are aiming for cloud computing, and ignoring existing markets. Typical wild speculation from brokers/share holders, and dodgies at the top looking for a bonus.

The bottom line is that Intel don't really have any CPU competition, so CPU computing has flat-lined. We have seen little or no improvement in desktop computing since the i7-980. The only area of competition is performance per Watt, and while you gain by reducing your electric costs, the constant hikes in energy prices eats that up.
Of course while Intel wins on the performance per Watt front, that's only if you consider CPU's and not APU's (CPU+GPU on a single chip). AMD totally destroys Intel with the low to mid range APU's. So resting on their CPU laurels, they're off chasing AMD's on chip GPU. But they may be flogging a dead horse (trying to get a decent GPU into their CPU's). Unfortunately for Intel, they have completely missed the boat on this one. It sailed a year or two ago. By the time Intel get a really good GPU into it's CPU's, AMD will have another better one out, and both AMD and NVidia will have released one or two more generations of gaming GPU's, which is where the short term market is really at for GPU's (better on-chip GPU's won't significantly improve office or laptop systems), and even if they were to, Intel isn't in a position to compete, and won't be any time soon. Desktops and laptops don't need a SB or IB. They are mostly used for typing and surfing!

All that Intel can try to do is to take more/hold onto the desktop/laptop market and produce high end CPU's for cloud servers. ARM is also becoming a real threat in both the laptop and server areas, especially if you combine the ARM CPU's with GPU's, which is what they are doing with NVidia.

Of course ignoring the wishes of gamers and crunchers for high end desktop CPU's (or just failing to deliver) also leaves the door open for a third party. There would be little or no loyalty shown if someone came in with a CPU capable of beating Intel's best effort desktop chip by say 50%. I don't think that's going to happen in the short term, but in the long run processing will increasing be on GPU's. The idea that you can have a CPU with a built in GPU may be replaced with a GPU with a built in CPU.
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