Enlarge / A lot has changed since 1918. But whether it's a literal (like the City of London School athletics' U12 event) or figurative (AI chip development) race, participants still very much want to win. (credit: A. R. Coster/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

For years, the semiconductor world seemed to have settled into a quiet balance: Intel vanquished virtually all of the RISC processors in the server world, save IBM’s POWER line. Elsewhere AMD had self-destructed, making it pretty much an x86 world. And Nvidia, a late starter in the GPU space, previously mowed down all of it many competitors in the 1990s. Suddenly only ATI, now a part of AMD, remained. It boasted just half of Nvidia’s prior market share.
On the newer mobile front, it looked to be a similar near-monopolistic story: ARM ruled the world. Intel tried mightily with the Atom processor, but the company met repeated rejection before finally giving up in 2015.
Then just like that, everything changed. AMD resurfaced as a viable x86 competitor; the advent of field gate programmable array (FPGA) processors for specialized tasks like Big Data created a new niche. But really, the colossal shift in the chip world came with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). With these emerging technologies, a flood of new processors has arrived—and they are coming from unlikely sources.

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