Poor AMD: Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.

The company best known as "that other PC chipmaker" and the firm that serves as a big Get Out of Jail Free card in Intel’s high-stakes game of Department of Justice Monopoly, is about to get squeezed from another angle. Say hello to my little friend ARM.

That's too bad, because AMD does a lot of things right and makes chips that actually emphasize the characteristics engineers seem to be asking for. So why, oh why, is the company on the skids?

There was a time when Intel and AMD were friendly partners and ARM didn't even exist. Back in ye olden tymes, chipmakers would often second-source their chips, willingly licensing the designs to other firms so that customers could be assured of two (or more) sources of supply. That was back before x86 processors were hugely popular; having a backup supply reassured skittish developers that their chip would always be available from somebody.