In 2015, Intel paid out more in stock dividends (~$4,500M) than ARM Holdings made in revenue ($1,489M).

Which, as I understand it, means that in 2015, Intel was probably at least two orders of magnitude more profitable than ARM Holdings. GP could still be right about margins, but as a shareholder, Intel would bave been much more preferable.

How long can Intel retain those profit margins though? ARM processors are the de facto architecture for mobile and IoT - as mobile processors get more powerful and more desktop class software becomes available on mobile devices, Intel's profitability is seriously threatened.

You could make the same argument about arm too, for that matter. Why pay for an arm license if you can get an equivalent risc-v chip (rtl, "soft core" or whatever it is that you get when you buy an arm license) for free? Well, not at the moment but in a few years when risc-v has matured a bit more..

Its likely Hacker News runs on Intel. There is no cloud - it's someone else's computer, as they say...

People have been predicting the demise of Intel for a long time now. "Now that AMD is shipping Opteron CPUs, there's no way Intel can retain the server market..."