Another way of looking at it is that AMD was always David to Intel's goliath. Intel screwed up big time with the Pentium 4; they designed the architecture for an extremely high clock rate, and ran headlong into a thermal dissipation brick wall. The Itanium, Intel's strange attempt to kill the x86 architecture which had brought them so much money, was another huge blunder. AMD exploited these opportunities. But unless Intel makes another big mistake, capitalism will do its thing and force AMD out of the market.
There was an announcement that AMD will make ARM-based chips in the near future. That niche might have some more air supply than the one they're in currently. However, they'll have a lot of competitors in the ARM space, so who knows.
I don't think Itanium was Intel's attempt to kill x86. They legitimately thought its architecture would represent an improvement and a good way to move to 64 bits.
Like Bulldozer, it was taking a risk that didn't pan out as hoped. Thank goodness CPU companies are still taking interesting risks.
It's kind of confusing because technically GlobalFoundries is separate from AMD. So if Apple wanted to manufacture their own custom ARM chip, would they be talking to GF, AMD, or both?
I also wonder what role AMD proper (as opposed to GF) will have in some kind of theoretical future world where ARM provides all the chip designs. Wasn't architecture sort of their main thing previously? I know a lot of companies add their own little things on to the base ARM designs, but it still seems like AMD will have to scale back their design team considerably in such a scenario.
There was an announcement that AMD will make ARM-based chips in the near future. That niche might have some more air supply than the one they're in currently. However, they'll have a lot of competitors in the ARM space, so who knows.